More than a month ago I promised myself to write down some comments about Lum’s book “MMG for dummies”. Then, along with a million of other things, the intention remained there, with an idea about the things I was going to write, but without actually finishing anything.

It’s so damn frustrating when you have a list of “things to do” that only keeps growing, leaving you with the feeling you are doing less and losing terrain every day.

Anyway, I wrote a reply on Q23 after the review on Slashdot and I was able to touch some of the points I was going to write about. So consider it a short version of that review and an idea of what I was going to say.

Of course I would have never bought a book like this if it wasn’t for Lum. And it’s really worth it, imho.

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The book is really good because of Lum’s writing style. Then it’s not terribly useful for an already experienced player but this “usefulness” wouldn’t be the reason to read it.

The point is that it couldn’t be better than that. Lum really adds to the book and if it wasn’t for him it could have been rather boring and redundant. Instead it isn’t and it’s a great fun reading it.

You can basically imagine a “MMO for dummies” book and apply to it all the qualities that Lum’s writing style has and you can have an idea about why the book is really that good and worth reading.

It also helps a lot to see things in persepective, out of the momentum. There’s a sense of progression and history that is being slowly built. It builds “community”. While reading the book I couldn’t stop to imagine how absolutely great it could have been if he didn’t have to limit himself to introductory text.

The book is really wonderful in the way Lum approached the topic and wrote about it, but it leaves you wishing all the time he was more free to explore and discuss some of those arguments and MMO history that are only hinted due to the scope of the book.

Think to Tolkien. One of the best qualities of LOTR is that there’s always a hint of a bigger story and setting behind the scenes. A whole world to explore that in the book is never fully disclosed, never “reached”. It builds desire without satisfying it.

Lum’s book is pretty much the same :)

Then you can basically open the book at random and find always some great passages. Two really random examples.

About the “guild drama”:

Romantic Triangles: Bill meets Sue through the guild. Bill likes Sue. Sue likes Bill. Bill and Sue talk. A lot. Sue also likes Bob. Sue and Bob talk. A lot. Sue sends Bill a message that was meant for Bob. Things get ugly. Fast.

Or the anecdotes:

When good evacs go bad

Once in EverQuest, a multigroup raid was using the public OOC (out of character) chat channel to organize their raid, to the irritation of others that were in the zone. One wag decided to solve the problem by yelling “EVAC!” in the OOC channel. Many of the characters with evac did the thing they’d been trained to do by months of gameplay — they immediately hit the evac button when they saw the word EVAC! in the chat channel. The raid ended horribly immediately thereafter…

Lum is a talented writer, he could write about “cooking” and make it unique.