[...] here. Raph Koster has a brief interchange with the site’s author, talking about similar sites and some of the weighty issues the new blog will be [...]

[...] Koster’s just posted a number of sources for online worlds coverage, including the latest, Worlds in Motion.  Compared to the regular [...]

Aww, I hope you will at least keep posting about trends in MMOs. You’re the best newsfilter around…

[...] Games Room Design 31.12 | 6:00 Monday Mailbag: WorldsInMotion, postures, games as art   www.raphkoster.com [...]

…The next is based on taking terriories as a Mayor or as a Crimelord. It would not only be a game of conquesting one world but of many differnt worlds….

Ahhh… a conquer-the-world/galaxy/universe game, one of the old stalwarts of early computer games. It’s a genre that seems to be under-represented these days, other than games like Shogun/Medieval/Rome: Total War. And that series is focused on military conquest as the primary means of territorial acquisition. Another recent commercial release worthy of note would be Galactic Civilizations — and that one was developed by an independent studio precisely because its developers saw the niche as being under-represented. And that was a game that was at least successful enough to spawn not only a sequel, but a deluxe edition of the sequel.

In this case, Susan could be pointing to a basic conflict between peaceful expansion via the formation of economic interrelationships (represented by the “mayors”), versus conquest by force (i.e, the “crime lords”). All kinds of levels of representation of the conflict could be written out. At one end would be totally abstract gains and losses, in which the application of “x” amount of resources by the “mayors” would be cross-referenced against the application of “y” amount of force by the “crime lords,” giving a result found at the intersection of the two values. At the other end of the spectrum would be the spinning-off of all sorts of details: The “mayors” could allocate resources to, say, local police forces, who would be pitted against local crime dens, the winners of which would designate a given zone as “crime free” or “seedy.” And perhaps the “mayors” could band together and form paramilitary or “national” military forces, which would wage large-scale conflicts against large high-crime rogue regions. And as peaceful commerce takes hold in a region, it gains momentum — maybe.

And so forth, ad infinitum.