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Role-playing will kill you: Facebook's MyGladiator app

Pay to be a slave and get your head lopped off.

Rafe Needleman Former Editor at Large
Rafe Needleman reviews mobile apps and products for fun, and picks startups apart when he gets bored. He has evaluated thousands of new companies, most of which have since gone out of business.
Rafe Needleman

Not sure if this is a good idea or not: NCursion is launching a new Facebook app called MyGladiator here at DemoFall. You start by building a character, and then equipping him with the gold you're given at the start, and then set him loose in the Forum against other users.

If one of the combatants is defeated before the end of five fighting rounds, the Facebook audience can vote thumbs-up or thumbs-down to determine if the character lives or dies. If he dies, it's off with his head, graphically. Nice.

These head-to-head combat apps on Facebook are proliferating like crazy. First Zombies, then Jedi, and now Gladiators. It's approaching overload. NCursion plans to charge users for access to its apps. I could be wrong, but I'm not sure people will pay for yet another one of these.