Topic
Giant Shrines as Oracles
The giant shrines should accept questions from people, and spit out an oracular answer. Brief questions, of 140 characters or less, since 140 characters is the common definition of acceptable brevity these days.. Now that might be a really cool Twitter feed to follow.
eta: ERK, meant to put this in Ideas, sorry!
Replies
- like fortune cookies?
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Yep--the shrine could generate any random kind of answer, unless all those Amazon Mechanical Turk people are still looking for something to do. And of course *my* giant would never answer my queries with something so piddling as a fortune cookie answer...the giant *I* choose to worship would speak the truth, unvarnished but in parable form. And then I would be free to interpret and share the good news with all of you. :-)
Plus, I hate it when I read my fortune cookie and someone else at the table has the same fortune...so pulling answers from some kind of database of pseudo-mystical quotes would not be fun, but maybe from some kind of socially generated content?
The Dalai Lama's twitter feed has stuff like this:
"Compassion should be unbiased and based on the recognition that others have the right to happiness, just like yourself."
but it also has content like this:
"Webcast: His Holiness Meets with South Florida Media bit.ly/bi7z6L";
So...I have no idea. Maybe I just want mailboxes shaped like giants' heads where the mouth is a pull-down door. -
the amazon mechanical turk idea is rather cool, actually.
it costs money tho.
maybe subscribers or item buyers or whatever could get a free number of oracular questions each month but i'm guessing that's too complicated to actually be worth it. -
... or ...
maybe experienced glitch players provide the answers, in return for cool items.
in the testing sessions there was a lot of "where do i find?" and "how do i do?" type questions asked in global chat.
maybe if in the actual game those kinds of questions were funneled through oracles and players who answered would get a direct benefit for doing so.
kinda like vark.com, except you'd actually get goodies for answering stuff : ] -
"in the testing sessions there was a lot of "where do i find?" and "how do i do?" type questions asked in global chat"---
yep, I posted some of that, and I would not have wanted to wait for an oracle to give me my answer, or to have to find a shrine to submit the query. I do like the idea of other players possibly answering questions put to the giants, though. - Good point, the better the sense of community, the stronger the game will be.
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"yep, I posted some of that, and I would not have wanted to wait for an oracle to give me my answer, or to have to find a shrine to submit the query"
that makes sense, though with the elimination of global chat, i figured that oracles might make good, near real-time conduits. groups could also do this, or the forum.