Can A Table Stand On One Leg? Critical and Ludological Thoughts on Star Wars: Galaxies
Timothy Burke reviews Star Wars: Galaxies
The title of this article always sticks with me. The language is remarkably dense, the criticisms of Star Wars Galaxies many. Still, Timothy Burke says this:
SWG does offer a virtual world with unparalleled depth and complexity in the MMOG marketplace. The world of Norrath in Everquest may be bigger and filled with a wider variety of opponents and locations, but it lacks the capacious economic and socializing dimensions of SWG. The world of Ultima Online (Electronic Arts 1997) may have a richness of internal history that SWG does not yet have, but for every world-simulating system UO can offer, SWG can trump it with two more. A Tale in the Desert (eGenesis 2003) may offer a more intricate economy, but its graphics and gameplay are vastly simpler, and it lacks combat. Alongside SWG, a MMOG like City of Heroes (Cryptic Studios 2004) does indeed look like what some of its critics say it is, a simplistic first-person shooter with persistently kept statistics of player performance. Both as player and as scholar, I am most interested in world-simulating MMOGs, and so for all my criticisms, I am still drawn to SWG. Against that siren call, perhaps no failure or misjudgment is fatal. Or perhaps grand ambitions demand gentler and more tolerant appraisal.
I do believe this is his one leg. What a well fashioned leg it was.
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