Bowling is a pure skill game. Pure being the key word.

My mom is a former professional bowler. PBA, USBC, championships, tours, TV, celebrity, the works. She also taught bowling to other sports professionals, mostly Chargers and even Chevy Chase. I’ve won bowling trophies as well, seven to be exact. I’m pretty sure my mom would disagree with you.

Bowling is just as much about skill as it is about luck. You’d probably find more bowlers, pro and amateur, who would say that bowling is more about oil and proper lane management than about skill. That said, skill doesn’t hurt, but skill alone doesn’t guarantee success.

There is a plateua that you hit naturally before you become a “student of the game”. That ramp is where casual gamers live. You know, the ones who raid thrice per YEAR.

Banana Republics and Renegade Pesos. But he says he’s never been in another song.

Tryin’ to find what is ailin’, livin’ in the land of the free.

Can’t it be more simple? Runnin’ from the freezin’, flu-inducing rain and screaming life everwhere? And of course, the lure of the sea. Hopin’ to find some fun.

I made once the off-hand disparagement of Big Buck Hunter for which I was chastised (as if the chastiser worked on that game) to the defense of equally disparaging Golden Tee, while snarking about how lucky we are that we sometimes get Galaga and singing the praises of foosball. XBox == JukeBox.

Too far and not far enough at the same time. Talk about NPC Permadeath. A cool and artistic castle in the sky.

[...] the players play, touches on a lot of the things that Raph harps on. First off, it’s clearly Asynchronous Competition – players do not have to be playing at the same time to play the same game. Yet, they often ARE, [...]

Often people who play Meridian 59 complain about something in the game. I will often tell them, sometimes in public, “you can leave, and the game will still be here when you want to come back in the future.” This creates an almost unbelievable amount of outrage when I say this! “That’s not good customer service!” people cry out. No, but it’s honest.

I think on some level the audience for our traditional games, especially the “hardcore” that stick with a game for over 10 years, want these games to be the way they are. If you want to use the bar analogy, they want our games to be Cheers where they’re part of the central cast. They want everyone they care about to shout, “Norm!” (or “Psychochild!”) when they log on. Yeah, there’s other people in the bar and sometimes the core players sometimes change, but they know where they’ll be for several hours each week.

On the other hand, most gamers are neophiles. Why does bowling not get complaints of “being a grind” despite being more mind-numbingly repetitive than anything we design? Someone who goes bowling isn’t looking for a new experience every night. Someone playing games usually does want a new experience; this is mostly, I’d argue, because the single-player game industry encourages it so people buy new games. One could also argue that games are much more compelling than bowling. I go bowling with friends not because I like bowling, but because I like my friends. The bowling is an excuse to socialize. For some people, this is the same attitude we have about games. I don’t love WoW, but it’s an excuse to play and keep in touch with my friends (and learn more about the game for game developers). (Of course, it’s possible there’s more WoW players than regular bowlers, so perhaps bowling isn’t a great example….)

My thoughts.

Its because people don’t pay money to hang out at the neighborhood bar. Yes, there’s a healthy markup on alcohol, but at most bars its not an outrageous markup. There are also social rules about alcohol that come into play. Bar that do charge to enter quickly become much more like theme parks/events than “social gathering places”

VWs that are primarily about social factors are up against a lot of essentially free competition. When you run out of content in a virtual world, it basically becomes an expensive chatroom. If I’ve exhaused all the content in a game that I consider fun, why would I pay $15 a month to hang out with my friends when I have so many free (IM/Skype/IRC/RL) alternatives?

Why are we more like theme parks than the neighborhood bar?

Part of it (though certainly not all of it) is that neighborhood bars have a captive audience. There are a finite number of bars in your neighborhood and only a fraction of those will fit your preferences (drink selection, pool tables, TVs). Online games have to be more ferociously competitive, because they can’t rely on geography to limit their competition.

I think the holy grail of virtual world stickiness really is your social circle. It’s interesting to me that no game has yet come along that made it very easy for me to get my friends online. I’ve got a host of friends interested in games and gaming, but we’ve never established a guild and played together on an MMO, because the friction is enormous. We all have to be willing to drop $50 on the same game at about the same time, willing to pay the monthly fee, be on frequently at the same time (and my friends and I keep weird schedules), and derive satisfaction from the same aspect of play (questing together, raiding together, grinding together).

Progress on that would involve 1) greasing the skids on getting my friends on the same game (e.g. letting two or three people play off a single box purchase, at least temporarily), 2) allowing some sort of delayed interaction even if my friends aren’t currently on (see facebook for examples of unsynchronized socializing). And I don’t mean mail. Something deep. Let me run their characters as NPCs and decorate their house. 3) Exposing in-game content and even functionality outside the client so people can take some action and maintain the social link even if they don’t have time to log in. and 4) something brilliant I haven’t thought of.

To some extent, maybe it’s even possible to represent a social link fundamentally in the game mechanics. Right now it’s more useful for me to have a lvl50 character with me that I don’t know than a lvl40 character run by my best friend, even though it’s in the interests of the game developer to have me playing with my friend as much as possible.

IMHO, every generation of mega-million dollar VWs will be just a little bit smaller, and just little bit easier to “complete” than the last generation. After all, how many people can afford to devote 500+ hours to an entertainment? VWs will never be mass market with such high barriers.

A player that pays you money but does not log in is described by many server programmers and producers as ‘the perfect customer’. However, it does not lend itself for having a cohesive and interesting community.