Revisiting the Laws

 Posted by (Visited 6434 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Jan 032009
 

No, not me. Razakius, over at Razakius.com, who is working on what looks like an ongoing project to revisit every Law of Online World Design.

This does happen every few years — someone decides to do a series revisiting them. I think this is healthy. The last new Law was “Socialization requires downtime,” which was a while ago.

One of the nicest things about the Laws, I think, is that when you read them they are so clearly high level that so many of the little design cul-de-sacs the Diku genre has fallen into are obviously not applicable. Nobody has asked for “PvP is evil” or “PvP must always be in RvR form” or some such to be put on there, for example.

On the other hand… never had to remove one yet, either. Not sure whether that is troubling or not!

  4 Responses to “Revisiting the Laws”

  1. Muckbeast says:
    January 4, 2009 at 12:50 am

    Every year or so I have a conversation with someone, or a topic of discussion comes up somewhere, that prompts me to track down the Laws again. They are impressively timeless. A good friend of mine contributed one of them as well, and I always enjoy seeing his name there. His law is:

    Hal Black’s Elaboration
    The more responsive an admin is to user feedback of a given type, the more of that type the admin will get. Specifically, as an admin implements features from user suggestions, the more ideas for features will be submitted. Likewise, the more an admin coddles whiners, the more whining will ensue.

  2. Michael Chui says:
    January 4, 2009 at 4:48 am

    I’ve never thought to do an actual analysis/critique/rewrite of them. That’s not a bad idea…

  3. schild says:
    January 4, 2009 at 2:24 pm

    That’s old and embarrassing.

  4. Tim says:
    January 4, 2009 at 2:28 pm

    I’ve had a copy of 201 Principles of Software Development by Alan Davis since around 1994 and love that book. It’s a set of short, one per page coverage of general, requirements, design, coding, testing, management, and other principles. An example is…

    Principle 101: Don’t Nest Too Deep
    Nesting IF-THEN-ELSE statements greatly simplifies programming logic. On the other hand, nesting them more than, say, three levels decreases their understandability considerably. The human mind is capable of remembering only a certain amount of logic before it becomes confused.

    The LoOWD list really makes me think of that book. In fact what it made me think is that someone should publish the equivalent book for game development. It’s not about creating long essays but just short 1 or 2 paragraph descriptions of principles.

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