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By the summer of 2008, Richard Garriott was nearing the completion of his training and scientific preparations for his journey into Earth orbit and, in what I can only describe as an impotent and offensive display of marketing serendipity which seemed less-than-spontaneous, Richard Garriott and NC Soft launched Operation Immortality, an attempt to promote his fortuitous launch into space. It was a website designed to offer voter polls delineating Mankind’s ten greatest achievements for dozens of different categories; ten greatest athletes, ten greatest films, ten greatest works of art, etc., along with free trials of Tabula Rasa. The winning entries would supposedly be collected in their entirety, digitized, and written to an unspecified, unremarkable device referred to as an “Immortality Drive“, which would also include the character profiles of active Tabula Rasa players, as well as the actual digitized DNA of a select few contest-winning players and participating celebrity personalities — because what better way to instill some hope in Mankind than leave available the option, in the event of a cataclysm, of restoring the species from the genetic material of vacuous entertainers and gaming nerds? Garriott even went as far promoting the game by displaying a sign on-camera just minutes after his launch inscribed with a message in the not-so-cryptic, invented symbolic language of Tabula Rasa, Logos.

And here is where things take an inevitable turn for the worse. If you’re still following along, I commend you. I’ve absent-mindedly made this whole ordeal quite mind-numbing, but have faith when I say there is a point, as there is more to all of this than what has been widely and mistakenly perceived as a poorly-designed video game. I pray you bear with me just a bit longer…

There’s a little-studied phenomenon in astronautics referred to colloquially as “The Overview Effect”, coined by a book of the same name that explores a condition whereby visitors to space become uniquely and humbly enlightened when exposed to the awesome vastness of deep space, or just the very scenic view of their home planet from low orbit. Whether or not it is literally a consciousness-expanding experience is still debated but any astronaut interviewed about the matter consistently agrees that the permanent alteration of their perceptions of existence and even purpose is something that is not possible remaining on the Earth’s surface, though it has been compared to the meditative states achieved by Buddhist monks, whatever that entails. So, Richard Garriott, already the consummate space traveler immersed in his commercial orbital experiments, comes under this ‘alien’ influence and determines that his life will be better spent in pursuit of the advancement of space exploration. Within just a few weeks of returning to Mother Earth, he promptly resigns from NC Soft (and Destination Games, as well, I assume, being that the latter is a subsidiary of the former) to further his aims as vice chairman of Space Adventures, the space tourism agency who arranged his orbital excursion.

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Tags: EPIC FAIL, FAIL, MMORPG, NC SOFT, OVERVIEW EFFECT, POSTMORTEM, RANT, RICHARD GARRIOTT, SPACE, TABULA RASA, TL;DNR, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 4:41 AM and is filed under Entertainment, Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.