6 ms·

Say what you want about MMO's but its most kids first taste of leadership hard work, and economics.

PakG1 12y ago
Met a maid of honour at a friend's wedding. She told me that she dropped out of university because she spent too much time on WoW. When her clan was on some sort of quest, they'd call her up and she'd run out of class to get online. She was one of their captains, and put hours and hours into the game, organizing players, planning things, etc. Never graduated and not doing much else, although she's surviving fine. So the question I have is whether there's any way to take that type of hard work ethic and get people to apply it to something more productive. Heck, I just gave a presentation at a barcamp style thing at a school on how Starcraft is actually a really intellectual game. But one thing I couldn't answer was whether it was possible to take the complex thinking that happens in a high-level Starcraft 2 game and see it blossom in everyday life for everyday tasks. :(
- mahouse 12y ago
  Life is not only about being productive. You have to entertain yourself as well. (That's not an excuse for not graduating, of course.)
  - saraid216 12y ago
    I feel you're mistaken on all three counts here. 1) She was productive. She just wasn't productive at being a college student. 2) She doesn't sound like she was being entertained. She sounded like she was handling logistics and leadership roles with great competence. To me, what I hear is "job satisfaction", except without pay. That's not entertainment. 3) Needing to entertain yourself is an excuse for not graduating. Probably not a sufficient one, but it's a valid one. Honestly, I think it's more accurate to say she dropped out due to burnout from working effectively two jobs.
    - mahouse 12y ago
      You are very right with thinking that some people take WoW leadership in raids, etc. as a job. That's something I overlooked.
- cdr 12y ago
  It's interesting that pro-level Magic: the Gathering players seem to almost all go on to have pretty successful professional lives. Maybe just being a physical game draws more well balanced people. Or that it's a solo game, despite teams being important for knowledge sharing at the pro level. Or that there's "down time" between Pro Tours - the number of weekly Grand Prix that are counted towards a season's score are even capped so that pros don't feel obligated to grind points week in and week out. You frequently read about "older" players skipping Pro Tours for exams or work or personal obligations.
  - emiliobumachar 12y ago
    Maybe prior wealth is a factor. As a collectible cards game, MtG taken seriously is a significant money sink. I don't know anything about the pro scene, but I assume it's composed almost exclusively of people who spent several thousands in that one game, e.g. they either already have another profession going on or are wealthy enough to have the deck stacked in their favor (sorry, couldn't resist). Was that a wrong assumption? By contrast, WoW requires ample access to a computer and the internet, which may not be yours or not primarily bought for the game, plus subscription fees. Not for the poor, but does not scale with dedication to the game.
    - cdr 12y ago
      The reputation as a "money sink" is somewhat undeserved. It can require a several hundred to several thousand dollar up-front investment, depending on how you play, but it's the only hobby I've ever seen where that investment can not just maintain but grow in value. I'm probably up $10,000 lifetime from Magic, though I got in early and invested heavily in older cards, so I'm something of an outlier. Absolutely anyone with the time to devote to learning the market can at minimum take very few losses. At the pro level, not that many players actually own the cards they play with. They're borrowed from collectors or loaned from shops. The cost of a deck is basically not an issue at the pro level. At the grinder level, yeah, the up-front cost can be. Most pro players probably do come from a reasonably privileged background, because you need to be able to spend the spare time to get good and have the resources to get to higher-level events to get good and qualify for the Pro Tour (the Online version mitigates travel costs somewhat, but it itself comes with costs). But I doubt most people trying to get to the Pro Tour are not any more wealthy than an average WoW player. Most grinders are college-age guys living on the cheap. Money is not the differentiating factor. IMO not being all-consuming is a factor (you think about it all the time, but you can't play it all the time short of spending $10/hour Online). If you're a pro performing well enough to be invited for an entire season, you technically only have to play four one-week events per year. Being physical and physically social is a factor. Being more analytical is a factor; notable numbers of pros have gone on to careers in stock trading, gambling odds-making, etc.
- btown 12y ago
  It's definitely an interesting question. Games like WoW can be excellent simulations of how to maintain morale in high-stress situations, which is basically what management in the startup world is all about. As a guild leader, you're thrown into the fire of needing to balance a personal touch and sensitivity for each individual team member's needs, against the general goals of the organization. And it's a situation where a growing leader can try different leadership styles and see what works without causing a real-life organization to sink into the ground. Worst case, some people are disappointed, but everyone picks up the pieces. You learn to use analytics tools (like worldoflogs.com which creates performance graphs based on raid event data) to be able to go up to people and say "hey, I think you can improve by trying X" without making things personal... much like agile startups use data-driven approaches ("velocity" and other metrics) to compartmentalize interpersonal relationships and team performance. With loot distribution, you learn that transparency and trust are key, and that you can set yourself apart in the community as an organization people want to be associated with. You learn how to recruit, how to hire, and even how to fire. And you learn to overcome the stress of making mistakes. That all said, in order to be at the level where you're leading and learning these lessons as a leader and not a follower, the time sink is necessarily huge. Is the benefit worth the reward? Not for people who already have opportunities to get this experience in "meatspace." But I'd like to think that as technology improves, coding becomes widespread... people who are educated on leadership with the next generation of MMOs will naturally shift towards starting their own startups, and they'll be more successful because of their MMO experience. It's a scalable education system, and as other posters commented, everyone needs fun. WoW, of course, is optimized for addictiveness, not optimized for teaching these lessons in the shortest amount of time possible. I never played America's Army, nor have I done much research on it, but it seems like at its best moments it became such a leadership training environment. There's a lot of room for exploration of this space. Further works: http://www.academia.edu/1317272/Leadership_Style_in_World_of_Warcraft_Raid_Guilds http://www.academia.edu/1317272/Leadership_Style_in_World_of... - plots a spectrum of leadership styles and how different guilds display those traits http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2009-01-14/how-world-of-warcraft-promotes-innovationbusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2009-01-14/how-world-of-... - a bit of a stretch, but has some interesting ideas
- bovermyer 12y ago
  This is indicative of how humans relate to each other, more than how people play WoW. Your friend has obviously connected with the people she plays with in WoW on a deep level. That's not a slight on internet relationships, or a commentary on modern online society - it's just an observation on your particular friend's interactions. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. And just because she isn't earning millions doing so doesn't mean she isn't an awesome person. I think, if anything, those people who have such devotion to a social group - regardless of that social group's reason for existing - are particularly noble.
- zanny 12y ago
  In most jobs the tenants of what made WoW so addicting and powerful in its hayday are inapplicable - in WoW, a lot of the game is a skinner box, designed around positive reinforcement of desired collaberative behavior. Especially in the vanilla incarnation. To have that same effect in a workplace, you need tangible and discrete goals, with real rewards for accomplishment. It actually really translates well into software, and most engineering disciplines, but not well in less productive professions like law or business. Your quest tracker is the issue tracker, your gold reward could be a bug bounty or bonus or team praise. Your sense of accomplishment is in shipping products, the way a guild has a sense of accomplishment for slaying a boss for the first time or clearing a raid. I think the greatest barriers to this kind of thinking, at least in the domain HN is concerned, is that your goals and objectives are not always discrete and manageable (ie, your quest log has an unknown mob kill requirement) and figuring out the next boss to kill can be difficult. If you had that information, I think software can really play out like a video game. When I bug fix in the KDE projects it really is a quest, the goals are discrete and the payoff is seeing my changes in the software I use every day. And I have the same feedback loop I had playing WoW from 2005-2009.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    A lot of software development and engineering is designing and figuring out what to do next; even bug fixing is often more about how to fix the bug than actually just fixing it. In that case, it is just as unproductive as law or business. This becomes more so as you advance to the senior technical ranks (though I never found any work I did to be so straightforward).
- grey-area 12y ago
  I've always liked to imagine a future where games are actually telepresence modules allowing users to mine asteroids using robots, monitor servers in a global cluster and protect them from attack, or run undersea farms here on earth, all from their home and with a sense that they're collaborating on a fun activity with friends. So instead of skinner boxes trying to get people addicted to pointless tasks and extract money from them for worthless virtual attributes, they'd actually be useful ways to earn a living. Probably instead corporations will find ways to make gamers work for them and earn them more money.
- meowface 12y ago
  The problem is the person, not the game. I started leading relatively large guilds and alliances (1000-6000 people) in a few MMOs at age 15. The experience and wisdom I gained from those experiences helped me greatly in my adult life. The games I played were very cutthroat and modeled off real-world politics, diplomacy, espionage, and warfare (the games in question were inspired by EVE and UO; I've also played those two, but not with leadership positions). I'm now 22 and I frequently see parallels in my working life. I can think of many times I've leveraged some of my past experiences to help make decisions, especially when it comes to big-picture strategic problems. Yes, it is easy to become extremely addicted to these kinds of games and it's tempting to sacrifice aspects of your personal or working life, but they can also offer a ton of fun and a ton of great learning opportunities. People just need to practice impulse control, and they need to set boundaries ("I won't login until I finish my homework for tomorrow", etc.). I think MMOs like EVE should receive more study and writing in the scientific community, because it's a perfect example of a microcosm of some of the more "base" nature of human psychology and behavior.
thenmar 12y ago
Is that a good thing? Aren't games like that designed to provide constant, positive, encouraging feedback for the player's "work"? There's no real risk of failure as long as you put enough time in, unlike the real world.
- cdr 12y ago
  Much as in life, you aren't competing versus the game - you're competing versus the other players. If you only put the minimum amount of work in to level up, you're never going to stand out.
  - thenmar 12y ago
    My point was that the game is specifically designed to remove the aspects of hardship, frustration, and uncertainty from the work. It's not an analogy for real world problems because the real world isn't designed to coddle you and make you want to keep playing (or working). You might as well say that Cookie Clicker provides useful life lessons. Edit: Feel free to disagree with me, but personally I wouldn't see WoW on a resume and think, "This person has experience doing hard work in the face of adversity".
    - cdr 12y ago
      Isn't it? There's no shortage of workaholics. Edit: > Edit: Feel free to disagree with me, but personally I wouldn't see WoW on a resume and think, "This person has experience doing hard work in the face of adversity". Many people would see a positive, depending on what you were applying for. Excelling at a game would almost always be a plus worth mentioning if you were applying to a gaming company, be it a developer or Twitch. It's no different than any extracurricular, only mention it if it's likely to help you. Excel enough at a game, and you can start your own business based on the game (as much as businesses started by young gamers tend to flame out very quickly) or get unsoliticed job offers (as much as they tend to be shady). Or now, between Twitch and Youtube, make playing the game your job.
    - datalus 12y ago
      Have you heard of Eve Online? You can lose your virtual shirt if you just bound about obliviously. It happens quite often and the game can be ruthless at times. I'm also surprised Raph didn't bring up Eve at all. It's a pretty successful and significant sandbox that takes its lineage from Ultima Online. It's nowhere behemoth level that WoW is but it fills its niche.
jghn 12y ago
I agree, although I'm older. For me it was the Battletech 3056 MUSE. I was in charge of a major faction (for BT folks, I was Thomas Marik). It was more than a 40 hour job, and on top of that I both had to still be a college student and maintain my secret character for fun having purposes. I managed a group of people which at the time seemed huge (still large by modern guild standards, but not enormous), complete with resource management, politics (who gets the good stuff?), etc. It taught me a lot, although it did lead to lesser grades at the time. And really, that taught me a lot too :)
- owyn 12y ago
  Wow, I played 3056 too (and a few of the other servers that were running at the time). I was briefly head of Kurita, but that happened just as I was transitioning out of college and into working so I had to hand it off pretty quickly. Mostly what I did was training new people in our pilot school, and we had a fun roleplaying based approach to it. I spend a lot of time at work helping people out too, I think it's just an expression of my personality no matter what the situation is. I had a lot of fun playing that game. I think one of the highlights was one of the server-wide tournaments that was run, with the prizes being "legendary" character names (and stats). I almost won that. In one of the final rounds, my opponent fell into a hole on a treacherous map with level 9 cliffs on it before a single shot was fired. I took a "role playing" approach to it and allowed him to restart because it wasn't an honorable win. I was winning the re-match until I got taken out by a BS engine crit. Oh well.
  - jghn 12y ago
    I enjoyed playing Kurita when I first started (right around the time they got their own server), and yes it was def the most RP heavy. I eventually stopped playing there because my char was female and there was some dude who clearly didn't understand char != real life and kept bugging me. C'est la vie! To my knowledge I was the 2nd Thomas Marik and stuck around almost to the end. It was really too bad that game never really got off the ground, but it was way too ambitious.

PakG1 12y ago

Met a maid of honour at a friend's wedding. She told me that she dropped out of university because she spent too much time on WoW. When her clan was on some sort of quest, they'd call her up and she'd run out of class to get online. She was one of their captains, and put hours and hours into the game, organizing players, planning things, etc. Never graduated and not doing much else, although she's surviving fine. So the question I have is whether there's any way to take that type of hard work ethic and get people to apply it to something more productive. Heck, I just gave a presentation at a barcamp style thing at a school on how Starcraft is actually a really intellectual game. But one thing I couldn't answer was whether it was possible to take the complex thinking that happens in a high-level Starcraft 2 game and see it blossom in everyday life for everyday tasks. :(

mahouse 12y ago
Life is not only about being productive. You have to entertain yourself as well. (That's not an excuse for not graduating, of course.)
- saraid216 12y ago
  I feel you're mistaken on all three counts here. 1) She was productive. She just wasn't productive at being a college student. 2) She doesn't sound like she was being entertained. She sounded like she was handling logistics and leadership roles with great competence. To me, what I hear is "job satisfaction", except without pay. That's not entertainment. 3) Needing to entertain yourself is an excuse for not graduating. Probably not a sufficient one, but it's a valid one. Honestly, I think it's more accurate to say she dropped out due to burnout from working effectively two jobs.
  - mahouse 12y ago
    You are very right with thinking that some people take WoW leadership in raids, etc. as a job. That's something I overlooked.
cdr 12y ago
It's interesting that pro-level Magic: the Gathering players seem to almost all go on to have pretty successful professional lives. Maybe just being a physical game draws more well balanced people. Or that it's a solo game, despite teams being important for knowledge sharing at the pro level. Or that there's "down time" between Pro Tours - the number of weekly Grand Prix that are counted towards a season's score are even capped so that pros don't feel obligated to grind points week in and week out. You frequently read about "older" players skipping Pro Tours for exams or work or personal obligations.
- emiliobumachar 12y ago
  Maybe prior wealth is a factor. As a collectible cards game, MtG taken seriously is a significant money sink. I don't know anything about the pro scene, but I assume it's composed almost exclusively of people who spent several thousands in that one game, e.g. they either already have another profession going on or are wealthy enough to have the deck stacked in their favor (sorry, couldn't resist). Was that a wrong assumption? By contrast, WoW requires ample access to a computer and the internet, which may not be yours or not primarily bought for the game, plus subscription fees. Not for the poor, but does not scale with dedication to the game.
  - cdr 12y ago
    The reputation as a "money sink" is somewhat undeserved. It can require a several hundred to several thousand dollar up-front investment, depending on how you play, but it's the only hobby I've ever seen where that investment can not just maintain but grow in value. I'm probably up $10,000 lifetime from Magic, though I got in early and invested heavily in older cards, so I'm something of an outlier. Absolutely anyone with the time to devote to learning the market can at minimum take very few losses. At the pro level, not that many players actually own the cards they play with. They're borrowed from collectors or loaned from shops. The cost of a deck is basically not an issue at the pro level. At the grinder level, yeah, the up-front cost can be. Most pro players probably do come from a reasonably privileged background, because you need to be able to spend the spare time to get good and have the resources to get to higher-level events to get good and qualify for the Pro Tour (the Online version mitigates travel costs somewhat, but it itself comes with costs). But I doubt most people trying to get to the Pro Tour are not any more wealthy than an average WoW player. Most grinders are college-age guys living on the cheap. Money is not the differentiating factor. IMO not being all-consuming is a factor (you think about it all the time, but you can't play it all the time short of spending $10/hour Online). If you're a pro performing well enough to be invited for an entire season, you technically only have to play four one-week events per year. Being physical and physically social is a factor. Being more analytical is a factor; notable numbers of pros have gone on to careers in stock trading, gambling odds-making, etc.
btown 12y ago
It's definitely an interesting question. Games like WoW can be excellent simulations of how to maintain morale in high-stress situations, which is basically what management in the startup world is all about. As a guild leader, you're thrown into the fire of needing to balance a personal touch and sensitivity for each individual team member's needs, against the general goals of the organization. And it's a situation where a growing leader can try different leadership styles and see what works without causing a real-life organization to sink into the ground. Worst case, some people are disappointed, but everyone picks up the pieces. You learn to use analytics tools (like worldoflogs.com which creates performance graphs based on raid event data) to be able to go up to people and say "hey, I think you can improve by trying X" without making things personal... much like agile startups use data-driven approaches ("velocity" and other metrics) to compartmentalize interpersonal relationships and team performance. With loot distribution, you learn that transparency and trust are key, and that you can set yourself apart in the community as an organization people want to be associated with. You learn how to recruit, how to hire, and even how to fire. And you learn to overcome the stress of making mistakes. That all said, in order to be at the level where you're leading and learning these lessons as a leader and not a follower, the time sink is necessarily huge. Is the benefit worth the reward? Not for people who already have opportunities to get this experience in "meatspace." But I'd like to think that as technology improves, coding becomes widespread... people who are educated on leadership with the next generation of MMOs will naturally shift towards starting their own startups, and they'll be more successful because of their MMO experience. It's a scalable education system, and as other posters commented, everyone needs fun. WoW, of course, is optimized for addictiveness, not optimized for teaching these lessons in the shortest amount of time possible. I never played America's Army, nor have I done much research on it, but it seems like at its best moments it became such a leadership training environment. There's a lot of room for exploration of this space. Further works: http://www.academia.edu/1317272/Leadership_Style_in_World_of_Warcraft_Raid_Guilds http://www.academia.edu/1317272/Leadership_Style_in_World_of... - plots a spectrum of leadership styles and how different guilds display those traits http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2009-01-14/how-world-of-warcraft-promotes-innovationbusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2009-01-14/how-world-of-... - a bit of a stretch, but has some interesting ideas
bovermyer 12y ago
This is indicative of how humans relate to each other, more than how people play WoW. Your friend has obviously connected with the people she plays with in WoW on a deep level. That's not a slight on internet relationships, or a commentary on modern online society - it's just an observation on your particular friend's interactions. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. And just because she isn't earning millions doing so doesn't mean she isn't an awesome person. I think, if anything, those people who have such devotion to a social group - regardless of that social group's reason for existing - are particularly noble.
zanny 12y ago
In most jobs the tenants of what made WoW so addicting and powerful in its hayday are inapplicable - in WoW, a lot of the game is a skinner box, designed around positive reinforcement of desired collaberative behavior. Especially in the vanilla incarnation. To have that same effect in a workplace, you need tangible and discrete goals, with real rewards for accomplishment. It actually really translates well into software, and most engineering disciplines, but not well in less productive professions like law or business. Your quest tracker is the issue tracker, your gold reward could be a bug bounty or bonus or team praise. Your sense of accomplishment is in shipping products, the way a guild has a sense of accomplishment for slaying a boss for the first time or clearing a raid. I think the greatest barriers to this kind of thinking, at least in the domain HN is concerned, is that your goals and objectives are not always discrete and manageable (ie, your quest log has an unknown mob kill requirement) and figuring out the next boss to kill can be difficult. If you had that information, I think software can really play out like a video game. When I bug fix in the KDE projects it really is a quest, the goals are discrete and the payoff is seeing my changes in the software I use every day. And I have the same feedback loop I had playing WoW from 2005-2009.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  A lot of software development and engineering is designing and figuring out what to do next; even bug fixing is often more about how to fix the bug than actually just fixing it. In that case, it is just as unproductive as law or business. This becomes more so as you advance to the senior technical ranks (though I never found any work I did to be so straightforward).
grey-area 12y ago
I've always liked to imagine a future where games are actually telepresence modules allowing users to mine asteroids using robots, monitor servers in a global cluster and protect them from attack, or run undersea farms here on earth, all from their home and with a sense that they're collaborating on a fun activity with friends. So instead of skinner boxes trying to get people addicted to pointless tasks and extract money from them for worthless virtual attributes, they'd actually be useful ways to earn a living. Probably instead corporations will find ways to make gamers work for them and earn them more money.
meowface 12y ago
The problem is the person, not the game. I started leading relatively large guilds and alliances (1000-6000 people) in a few MMOs at age 15. The experience and wisdom I gained from those experiences helped me greatly in my adult life. The games I played were very cutthroat and modeled off real-world politics, diplomacy, espionage, and warfare (the games in question were inspired by EVE and UO; I've also played those two, but not with leadership positions). I'm now 22 and I frequently see parallels in my working life. I can think of many times I've leveraged some of my past experiences to help make decisions, especially when it comes to big-picture strategic problems. Yes, it is easy to become extremely addicted to these kinds of games and it's tempting to sacrifice aspects of your personal or working life, but they can also offer a ton of fun and a ton of great learning opportunities. People just need to practice impulse control, and they need to set boundaries ("I won't login until I finish my homework for tomorrow", etc.). I think MMOs like EVE should receive more study and writing in the scientific community, because it's a perfect example of a microcosm of some of the more "base" nature of human psychology and behavior.

thenmar 12y ago

Is that a good thing? Aren't games like that designed to provide constant, positive, encouraging feedback for the player's "work"? There's no real risk of failure as long as you put enough time in, unlike the real world.

cdr 12y ago
Much as in life, you aren't competing versus the game - you're competing versus the other players. If you only put the minimum amount of work in to level up, you're never going to stand out.
- thenmar 12y ago
  My point was that the game is specifically designed to remove the aspects of hardship, frustration, and uncertainty from the work. It's not an analogy for real world problems because the real world isn't designed to coddle you and make you want to keep playing (or working). You might as well say that Cookie Clicker provides useful life lessons. Edit: Feel free to disagree with me, but personally I wouldn't see WoW on a resume and think, "This person has experience doing hard work in the face of adversity".
  - cdr 12y ago
    Isn't it? There's no shortage of workaholics. Edit: > Edit: Feel free to disagree with me, but personally I wouldn't see WoW on a resume and think, "This person has experience doing hard work in the face of adversity". Many people would see a positive, depending on what you were applying for. Excelling at a game would almost always be a plus worth mentioning if you were applying to a gaming company, be it a developer or Twitch. It's no different than any extracurricular, only mention it if it's likely to help you. Excel enough at a game, and you can start your own business based on the game (as much as businesses started by young gamers tend to flame out very quickly) or get unsoliticed job offers (as much as they tend to be shady). Or now, between Twitch and Youtube, make playing the game your job.
  - datalus 12y ago
    Have you heard of Eve Online? You can lose your virtual shirt if you just bound about obliviously. It happens quite often and the game can be ruthless at times. I'm also surprised Raph didn't bring up Eve at all. It's a pretty successful and significant sandbox that takes its lineage from Ultima Online. It's nowhere behemoth level that WoW is but it fills its niche.

jghn 12y ago

I agree, although I'm older. For me it was the Battletech 3056 MUSE. I was in charge of a major faction (for BT folks, I was Thomas Marik). It was more than a 40 hour job, and on top of that I both had to still be a college student and maintain my secret character for fun having purposes. I managed a group of people which at the time seemed huge (still large by modern guild standards, but not enormous), complete with resource management, politics (who gets the good stuff?), etc. It taught me a lot, although it did lead to lesser grades at the time. And really, that taught me a lot too :)

owyn 12y ago
Wow, I played 3056 too (and a few of the other servers that were running at the time). I was briefly head of Kurita, but that happened just as I was transitioning out of college and into working so I had to hand it off pretty quickly. Mostly what I did was training new people in our pilot school, and we had a fun roleplaying based approach to it. I spend a lot of time at work helping people out too, I think it's just an expression of my personality no matter what the situation is. I had a lot of fun playing that game. I think one of the highlights was one of the server-wide tournaments that was run, with the prizes being "legendary" character names (and stats). I almost won that. In one of the final rounds, my opponent fell into a hole on a treacherous map with level 9 cliffs on it before a single shot was fired. I took a "role playing" approach to it and allowed him to restart because it wasn't an honorable win. I was winning the re-match until I got taken out by a BS engine crit. Oh well.
- jghn 12y ago
  I enjoyed playing Kurita when I first started (right around the time they got their own server), and yes it was def the most RP heavy. I eventually stopped playing there because my char was female and there was some dude who clearly didn't understand char != real life and kept bugging me. C'est la vie! To my knowledge I was the 2nd Thomas Marik and stuck around almost to the end. It was really too bad that game never really got off the ground, but it was way too ambitious.