I got you there, didn't I?

So, let's take a look at this deceptively simple ceremony known as marriage. Looks innocent, doesn't it? Put a few diamonds ingame, bow and wham! Lightning strikes! Zap!

There's a catch. Once married, you would have access to your spouse' equipment, loot, items, etc. Whatever he/she owns, you have access to. This also applies to all the guilds that he/she is currently in as well as the privileges that comes with the guild access levels. At the same time, your spouse would also have access to your worldly goods and guild member status. Like wow! There's no hiding of items or wealth from this person at all.

Throw in an uncontrollable factor and bang! Instant fame! Or rather, becoming infamous. You see, if your spouse is someone you couldn't trust to behave ingame, they can wreck massive havoc. Since there's no concept of divorce, it's either live with it or ban that person.

And it is the latter option that is coming under fire in the recent forum debates. Have a read and you'll see what I mean.

ATITD is a complex social game where the community actually are given the freedom of choice. There are, of course, may different views of how the choices are to be executed and intense debates happen both in-game, in forums and in IRC channels. But that's also what is one of the attractive part of ATITD, that there is a choice that the community can exercise.

Anyway, wondering whether I got married? Of course. Remember the Bjork picture? Hee hee. Got perks in game for that : MORE BARLEY! Hateful stuff to grow. Although, he's now not in-game anymore and, sad to say, I do not have much time either. I try to get in-game now and again to see what is going on.

So I just received a request for profile information from the charming and talented Ophelea, site owner here at gamersinfo.net, and among the questions were things like 'all MMOs ever played,' which got me thinking about the reasons I play ATITD a year and a half after log in. See, I've played many of the MMOGs on the market (including a few that came out after I began ATITD) and none of them held my interest for more than a few weeks, if that. Everquest, the first one I ever played, literally lasted for two days before I was tired of it. But that didn't stop me. While I didn't see the appeal in Everquest itself, I thought to myself, 'this genre has real possibilities,' and went in search of a game that took advantage of those possibilities.

Some of the games, as I said, lasted for a few weeks; some lasted for as long as a few months. Fortunately, I live with someone who likes to play MMOGs, so I wasn't out the box cost for most of these trials (I also did a lot of beta testing). Most of what I thought of as the traditional MMOGs had too much of a grind for me and didn't have a varied enough selections of things to do. The 'social' games (like The Sims Online and There) had absolutely nothing to do: no goals, no genuine sense of accomplishment, no story.

The first thing that I think appealed to me about ATITD is that the game ends; we can win or we can lose. I also remember thinking that this is a game that is different; the designers of this game see the same open possibilities, the same potential for social experiment, that I saw the first time I logged in to Everquest (and was subsequently disappointed). And whether they are successful or not, they are genuinely attempting to take advantage of everything that this medium, and this genre, has to offer.

I have, of course, felt disappointment and frustration at various points in the time I've spent in Egypt. The game is not, in fact, perfect. Some days I'm not even entirely sure that it's good (fortunately, those days are moderately rare). But what keeps me around is the desire to see where this whole ride is going and the desire to see what two guys with a vision can make of things. There is something really beautiful about a game that attempts to subvert every idea we have of what a MMOG is supposed to be.