 | Lessons Learned, and gaming folks using web waysOctober 1st, 2008 |
Lessons Learned is a really good blog that gives a lot of insight into exactly all the sorts of things that I was referencing in that AGDC panel on how we have to adapt to web ways of doing things. Be sure to read through the archives.
I commented on that panel that the notion of doing things like A/B split testing is sort of foreign to game developers. But it’s something incredibly powerful when correctly applied. But it’s a little hard to conceive of saying “the combat rules are different from fight to fight.” The commonest form of game A/B testing is alternate rule shards, which is a huge investment and is far too large and game-adjusting an approach to really be used as a split testing factor.
It’d be worth pondering what sorts of split testing could be fruitfully brought into the game world, given how useful a tool it is. Of course, part of the barrier for game teams in the large-scale MMO world is that clients are updated via patches, not streaming, and there is no good mechanism typically for patching only half the clients, or some such. But imagine having taken the original SWG UI icons and the more colorful NGE revamp, and upgrading only half the users — and then seeing whether the control or the new design have better metrics.
There’s a level of commitment that we feel when making game changes that we should try to avoid. After all, successful game design in the early stages of prototyping and platytesting involves killing lots of sacred cows, often making big shifts in how things are played. But we tend to see patches as a case where “it’s a big deal if we have to revert.” Part of the web way is acknolwedging the frequency of mistaken hypotheses.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
