Procrastination Amplification: Punditry on MMOs and games in
general.  False Expectations  Remember the good old text
adventures (and early point-and-click adventures) where you had
a set of verbs that you could use to combine various objects?
“Use rope on cannon” would make for a makeshift fuse while “use
rubber chicken on cable” created an interesting method of
transportation. If you remember these, you probably also
remember the endless tries of combining things which each other
that the game didn’t want you to combine. These games raised
false expectations of freedom by pretending to let you do
whatever you wanted while actually carefully restricting you to
a preset path.  Surely there must be more than one use for this
incredible rubber chicken?  Spinks wrote a strong post on the
topic realism in games today, explaining why we don’t really
need quests to guide our every step through a role-playing game.
One of her examples deals with a wagon on the side of a rode,
stuck there because the horse that was s