Post by Morreion on Nov 26, 2010 9:10:55 GMT -5
The Kingdom of Loathing official site
Kingdom of Loathing (Wikipedia)
Kingdom of Loathing (abbreviated as KoL) is a browser-based, multiplayer role-playing game designed and operated by Asymmetric Publications, including creator Zack "Jick" Johnson and writer Josh "Mr. Skullhead" Nite. The game was released on February 23, 2003. Because content is still being added frequently, the game is still considered unfinished and officially remains in open beta.
It uses hand-drawn stick figure graphics and writing characterized by surreal humor, word play, parody and references to popular culture. In KoL, a player's character fights monsters for experience, meat (the game's currency), and items, through a turn-based system. Players may also interact with each other through player versus player competition, participate in the in-game economy by trading goods and services, organize their characters into clans, and speak to each other in many different chat channels.
Between 2006 and 2007, the game hosted a player base of approximately 140,000 regular users and 190,000 active accounts. It is also particularly notable for managing to be financially successful purely from donations and the purchase of virtual goods rather than from advertising or subscription fees like many online games.
The Game Archaeologist's fear and loathing in the Kingdom: The highlights (Massively)
"KoL players pride themselves on being a cut above the grammatical mishmash that is the typical MMO chat channel, which makes sense in a game that's completely dependent on the English language. In fact, before you're even allowed to spew brain-farts into general chat, the game requires that you pass a literacy test that hopefully weeds out those who haven't quite figured out that "you're" and "your" are completely different words. On top of this, moderators police the chat channels for rogue idiots, often silencing them for hours or days depending on the severity of their crime."
The Game Archaeologist's fear and loathing in the Kingdom: Interrogating Mr. Skullhead (Massively)
"Anybody who is passionate about our game is going to share our love of wordplay and pop culture. I mean, you have to -- it's not like you play because you love eye-popping visuals or knuckle-biting action. So I think our community's a little smarter and a little funnier than your average internet citizen. We've met some amazing, fantastic people over the years. Some have moved on, some are still around, but I'm in touch with a lot of them."
The Game Archaeologist's fear and loathing in the Kingdom: Joshing with Jick (Massively)
"I read a quote from the Mystery Science Theater guys at one point where they talked about how even if there was only one guy out there who got a joke they made, it was worth it, because it was gonna be great for that guy. That's kind of the approach we take -- we're writing this stuff to amuse each other, and the fact that it amuses the audience too is a happy accident. The neat thing about having such a smart playerbase is that nothing is so obscure that it won't find an audience at all. It affords us the opportunity to get a casual, Wikipedia-level knowledge of a lot of different fields, so that we can write a bunch of dumb one-liners about whatever random subject we've picked."
