Dragon Age - Ray Muzyka Interview @ Gamasutra
 

Ray Muzyka has been active doing interviews lately and Gamasutra is the latest site with a conversation with EA's "group general manager of the RPG/MMO Group". Titled An Age to Come, Ray discusses Dragon Age's planned social networking aspects, PC vs console controls and modding:
More information.

Ray Muzyka apparently doesn't know anything about what a hero's journey is all about. It is, indeed, not a journey in which you involuntary more or less, are being conscripted into the army's elite unit, in DA: Origins called the Grey Wardens.

A hero's journey is one where an ordinary man is subject to a change in his enviroment or experience a crisis of some sort. He, then decides, to do something about it, to go beyond his ordinary life as say a farmboy or a teenager on a desert planet.

And the so-called social community Bioware is planning isnt' it just a forum for spoilers?

So… they are making forums… right? Is that what he wanted to say?

Probably a forumish thing where your choices are displayed in a neat way, without having to specifically tell each other what you did.

Also, a hero doesn't have to be someone who gets their life turned upside down by some great event. Someone like al'Lan Mandragoran in Wheel of Time is certainly a hero, and he was shaped to be one from his birth, though certain things did impact his decisions of course.

No no no. It's much more than that. It's a cutting edge online, social networking community. Maybe with spoiler tags.

To me 'social networking' is just the buzz-word of the last couple of years. Everything with 'social networking' is better. Since Tweeter is popular, and all it is is people letting others know about what they had for breakfast, then it's obviously good for RPGs too, right? right???

Soon we may have epic, dark and gritty social networking :D

but will it be mature?

Now somebody must go on:

And will you be able to get sex cards? :p

Do people really buy this vapid hype?

Well, it´s unbelievably cheap so some probably do.

Just wait till they create a game using those sex cards along the lines of Magic the G!! :D

You obviously have no clue about Twitter - to the point of not even knowing the correct name - so why bother chiming in with inaccurate generalities you obviously heard from someone else?

Well obviously I wasn't serious… or 100% serious. I'm sure there's a lot of information that you can spread with, what is it, 150 characters? So maybe you can actually say what you had for breakfast and lunch (if you don't mention the dessert)

Yes, that's my impression. Only 150 characters? Doesn't that limit you to just sound bites rather than meaningful information?

No no, you could always skip the main course and list the desert instead. So you have plenty of possibilities to express yourself.

Well, with the lolzspeak it's possible I guess, something like…
ZOMG did u c d l8st DA vid? D sux! u hav a swrd & cut all heds & blod, LOL!

You can use links too, most seem to shorten them with one of the links-shortening services. And a link says more than a thous.. I mean, 150 characters. ;)

Yes you could link to a page describing your breakfast, lunch and dinner menue! And showing pictures from your collection of sex cards.

It is hilarious and ironic that all of the last posts ridiculing Twitter would have fit as Tweets … :D

Sure, but we didn't pretend to do something useful, when writing them.
So your remark doesn't prove that that tweety thingy is good for anything useful.
:lol:

Yet you were purposefully denigrating Twitter as being the place to say 'I'm taking a poop now' and absolutely useless for anything else. My point is that the bulk of forum talk falls into the character count of Twitter … meaning Twitter is no less useful than the bulk of forum chatter. Certainly more useful than IM, as you can have links and so on track stuff said about you or about certain topics.

If you want to be ignorant that is fine, just realize that each time you open your mouth on the subject you are not showing lack of knowledge, but ignorance.

I know you're a big fan, Mike, but I just don't get it. Can you point me to a feed that's useful/interesting and where the content wouldn't have simply been better somewhere else. like on a blog? I've never seen anything remotely useful and backtracking links in such as small format is a pain in the ass, I find.

You say a big part of forums is no more useful but that's hardly an endorsement. Forums are easier to read, you can make a longer reply if you want/need to…what does Twitter bring to the table that improves that function?

I read the fake Phil Spector tweets. Those were pretty funny.

To me, Twitter can be like an aggomeration of Facebook, RSS Reader, IM, and a massively spammed email account.

I have a tightly controlled list of folks I follow who fall into these basic types:
- Actual friends: some post 'TwitPics' of stuff while on vacation, etc, or just general info … sometimes useful, other times not so much.
- Internet friends - same as above, but the integrated DM function is very nice for private messages at any time.
- Game companies (Bioware, CDP, etc) - PR, contests, general info
- Game retail sites (GamersGate, GoG, etc) - PR, contests, general info
- Music blogs - new releases, cool interviews, podcasts, articles, etc
- Artists - general info, for example got road reports from Wynton Marsalis and Dave Holland from recent tours
- Gadget Sites - new tech info, gadgets, deals, etc
- Deal sites - sales!

I have TwitterFox, a small icon in my lower right of the browser that will update as stuff comes in.

I am not saying it is for everyone - on vacation last week I barely touched it at all - but there is a difference between having no interest and the ignorant bashing that has been happening here.