Is this a first? I dunno, but it’s darn cool!

Earlier today, I had asked Grace McDunnough if she could help out one of our users, Fredriksson,  try out live concert streams in Metaplace. Grace jumped in with both feet, and after we got it working (using the off-the-shelf guitar I made a while back!)  she mentioned that she had a concert this very evening…!

So at the very last minute, with no prep, Grace suggested dual-streaming the show, and Fredriksson volunteered his folk music cafe… and a few hours later, there we were, listening to live music played in two virtual worlds at once!

A few folks even watched the show in both worlds at the same time… here’s screenshots taken by one of them:

Watching GraceMcDunnough’s live performance in Metaplace and then on Second Life!

Phasing Grace has a post about an open source Stanford project called Siritaka. There’s a few videos there. It’s apparently launching soon.

Sirikata Teaser from Sirikata on Vimeo.

The teaser trailer has much the same generic VW look that is becoming the standard these days — nice looking avatar, too! — but I have not yet had time to dig into the technical talk.

Sirikata Architecture from Sirikata on Vimeo.

There’s a great postmortem of the Metaplace game jam we did a couple of weeks back at WorldIV.com » Surprisingly, Making Games is Hard Work.

The jacks game I made

I did jacks – I was planning on doing Pente after that. My thoughts on it:

• Gosh, a lot of people don’t know what jacks is! Which caught me by surprise. Perhaps it was a side effect of growing up in a third world country, but cheap games like jacks and marbles were all the rage when I was a kid. And yeah, jacks is considered more of a girl’s game than a boy’s game, and we had a room full of guys in the jam. (Ironic, since it is a truly ancient game. Next time you read about “knucklebones” in your favorite fat fantasy novel, they’re playing a form of jacks.)
• I cheated. We were supposed to pick stuff that was designed already. But I’ve never seen a videogame version of jacks. So I did actually sneak in design in there. As it turned out, that was easily the biggest time sink, as I wrestled with stuff like how to handle the ball bouncing mechanic.
• Reduce mechanics! I ended up throwing away the element of how hard you throw the ball at the ground to give your self more time. I also threw away the mechanic of sweeping up more than one jack in your hand at once. This made the game much simpler.
• Always do core mechanics first. This is one that always seems to elude people new to rapid prototyping. Don’t get distracted with the complicated matchmaking system. Don’t get caught up in even the timer. Make it so you can pick up a jack. Then make it so you can pick up several jacks. Then add the timer. Then add turn-taking. Layer things in, don’t jump to the ideal.
• Flavor matters a ton. As much as I say “do blue squares first!” I do try to get placeholder graphics in as soon as I have the core mechanic, because you are aiming for an experience too.
• Jacks kinda works better one-player this way, because turns are kind of long. I compensated by letting you watch the other player’s moves, but it is still not entertaining enough to just watch them.

These were designed a little games that you can click on someone else and invite them to play. The screenshots, by the way, are what jacks looked like about an hour after the jam ended, so I got all the way to “alpha” — playable, reasonably balanced, and with a general visual design in place.

We’re laying out Metaplace Central again. We have iterated it a lot, as we try out different flows, add new tech that makes it more appealing, and so on. These days, what with the balloons, the board games on the table by the cafe, and the many teleporters to user worlds, layout is growing more challenging as we strive to both fit everything in and also make it a social space.

Musing on these problems not only made me dig out my copy of A Pattern Language but also reminded me of how 8 years ago I did a brief examination of the maps of two popular cities in what were then two popular MMOs: Ultima Online and EverQuest. These days, the science of zone layout has improved a lot.

Read the rest of this entry »

Celia writes,

Suvudu Free Book Library has a bunch of free downloads books from Del Rey — really great ones. Nice to see another free library out there. And hey, Naomi Novik, Robin Hobb, Kim Stanley Robinson — hurry, go grab ‘em!

Back in July of 2008, I pointed out YoVille, a Facebook MMO that runs as an app. Back then, it had 150,000 daily uniques.

Today, I’m here to tell you that YoVille is almost certainly more popular than WoW in North America.

The Top 25 Facebook Games for March 2009 and The Top 25 MySpace Games for March 2009 are a pair of posts over at the Inside Social Games blog. And what do they say? That YoVille has 2.26m users on MySpace and 4.46m on Facebook. And yes, these are monthly uniques.

Now, there is probably some overlap between the stats on the two services. And there is little doubt that WoW makes a lot more money, and is a lot more game.

But we should not be quick to discount this. More game and better art can be added. YoVille is a virtual world: it has avatars, money, inventory and housing. It has embedded games. It has a map. It has chat and persistence. And it’s in Flash. Oh, and they picked up 1m users in the last month.

Amid all the hoopla over whether there is room to go around WoW, here’s an answer.

Every once in a while, I get asked about doing an updated version of Theory of Fun. I generally reply that not only do I not have time, but that there’s fairly little that seems to merit updating. Plenty has moved on the political front, but science moves more slowly, and so most of the stuff that the book references as its underpinnings hasn’t seen any radical changes.

Then again, the book doesn’t dive all that deeply into some of it. I think the only reference to dopamine happens in the end notes, even though it’s central to the statement that fun doesn’t equal flow. (Arguably, the better update would be to surface that stuff more in the book…)

Well, the science does move some, and iHobo has a pair of great summary articles on Why You Play Games and The Biology of Compulsion which sum up quite a lot of the recent research on all this. Not only is it a handy reference, but there’s also a pointer towards the forthcoming book Beyond Game Design: Nine Steps Towards Creating Better Videogames, with articles by Bateman, Lazzaro, Bartle, Isbister, and others. My pre-order is in!