Me: I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Linus. E3 (The Electronic Entertainment Expo) is coming. But I’m not excited. I know I should be happy, but really I’m just depressed.

Linus: Dragonchaser, you’re the only one I know who could take a wonderful time like the annual E3 and turn it into a problem…

Me: Gaming is becoming tooo commercial. RATS!

OK, apologies for that… but E3 *is* this week, and I really can’t work up much enthusiasm for it. For those of you who don’t know, this is the Big Event in gaming… it’s a huge melange of tech playground, disneyland, strip joint, schmooze-fest and, of course, arcade. If you’re in the gaming business: publisher, developer, journalist, PR… anything… you’re at E3 this week.

So why aren’t I excited? No idea. I went to the first couple of E3’s (I was working as one of the editors at what is now Computer Games Magazine) and man, what a rush they were. Three days of frantic meetings about the stuff I lived for… it was intense… an assault on all five senses as game after amazing game was paraded out to strut its stuff in an attempt to seduce me (I was, after all, The Press *grin*). Then when the show shut down for the night… HUGE parties. Great stuff…

Well, so maybe I’m not excited because I don’t go any longer?

No, don’t think so. Although I did ache to go for the few years following me leaving the mag, I’m over that now. Instead, I surf gaming sites frantically, gathering data as rumours get confirmed and surprise announcements are made… and I share this with friends at the Pub. It’s supposed to be a time of wide-eyed amazement and exclamations of “oh man, how will I stand waiting for that to come out!?”

But I’ve checked out some of the pre-show coverage and nothing is exciting me. I’m not sure if its that the games are all just ‘more of the same’ or that we’ve already heard about the biggies. Or maybe its me.. could I finally be growing up? Ye gods, that’s a frightening thought.

Maybe its that I spend so much time in MMRPGs these days, and I know that I can’t really play more than one of them. Maybe its because there’ll be no new hardware announcements worth noting (though I’m still hoping Nintendo surprises us with a backlit GBA).

This is where I dazzle you with my revelation except… I honestly don’t have one. I think, though, that its me. I still call myself a gamer, but really I’ve turned into more of a game collector than a game player. I’ll buy a game, play it for a few hours, and shove it on the shelf to rot. They just don’t seem compelling anymore… after a few hours, I get bored. Hmm, well, maybe it isn’t me after all. Maybe the industry is getting stale? These days I get more excited about a game’s editing tools coming out then I do about the games themselves. Why? Because I have more fun thinking about building add-ons (mind you, I never actually get around to building them) than I do playing the games.

How weird is that? Maybe I need to start looking in the corners for floppy little old-style games that, with the right kind of love, can turn out to be something really special.

Bah, another blessed weekend fades into the past and its time to descend back into the firey pits of hell (aka work). I’m quite sure I was meant to be born a trust fund kid… but anyway…

Spent most of today shoveling out my hovel, but I did sneak some time to work through a great tutorial on using the Morrowind Construction Set. For the first time, I started to concentrate on WHAT I was building rather than HOW to work the editor. I think I could get used to this editor, though I still wish Morrowind was prettier. Mind you, its got great graphics, but they’re great graphics of a bleak and grim land. That, and IMO the humanoid models are homely as hell.

I like the look of Dungeon Siege a lot more, but until the next release of the Siege Editor I’ve put that on hold. Also on hold is the NWN editor, until the game comes out.

Of course at this point, its all moot because I don’t have a story to tell yet… still, practice with the tools can’t be a bad thing.

I’m intrigued and delighted by this ‘game editing’ trend becoming so big. I mean, granted there have always been editors for games; either fan built hacks or tools included by the developers. But we’re getting to the point where some kind of editing tool is pretty much expected from the game buying public, and at the same time, developers are realizing how much the fan community can add to their public exposure.

You can imagine the bean-counters seeing this as a two edged sword. On the one hand, giving away the tools means you’re expanding the ‘hours played’ of a given game, and therefore pushing back the time when Joe Gamer walks into EB to buy something new. On the other hand, once a game hits critical mass in the editing world, it becomes an Event and builds huge brand awareness. We’re all salivating for the next Unreal, but who remembers Shogo?

But I digress…

What I’m excited about today is the new breed of RPG Editing tools. Four fairly hot RPG’s now have editing tools available:

• Morrowind (editing tools come with the game)
• DungeonSiege (Beta version of the siege editor is currently out… a bit of hacking required to play the maps.)
• Freedom Force (Check out the new ModForce site for lots more info.
• Neverwinter Nights (The wonder here is that the game isn’t even out yet, but a beta version of the tools are. If you don’t want to deal with the 240 meg download, you can get the tools when you pre-order NWN, or just wait for the game to come out… the tools will be included.)

We dragonchasers dream of fantastic places to explore. Of escaping the dreary, mundane existence of real life. We’ve turned to books or games or movies to show us these places, and the more clever of us have created our own worlds in the form of written fiction. Now, with these tools, it becomes possible for us to create our own interactive worlds. It won’t be easy, but it’ll be a lot easier than having to start from scratch.

Here’s a chance to bring our imaginations to life! Pick a game, grab an editor, and create the world you’ve always wanted to explore. It’s a pretty cool opportunity, and one that wasn’t available to most of us until just recently. Props to the developers for giving us these tools.

If you’ve played Dungeon Siege, you’ll probably get a kick out of the recent Angst Technology comic strips.