Nov 212014
 

500px-WOW_logoTen years of World of Warcraft. Well. So many thoughts.

WoW has always been a contradiction of sorts: not the pioneer, but the one that solidified the pattern. Not the experimenter, but the one that reaped the rewards. Not the innovator, but the one that was well-designed, built solidly, and made appealing. It was the MMO that took what has always been there, and delivered it in a package that was truly broadly appealing, enough so to capture the larger gamer audience for the first time.

Don’t get me wrong; that’s not a knock on it. If anything, it’s possibly the biggest game design achievement in all of virtual world history. After all, we’re talking about taking a game skeleton that was at that point already almost a decade and a half old, one which had literally had hundreds of iterations, hundreds of games launched. None of them ever reached that sort of audience, that sort of milestone, that sort of polish level.

Continue reading »

Mar 042000
 

Wow, it’s been a while since I updated anything here…. ah well, there’s new stuff today!

I’m going to be at the Game Developer’s Conference next week. I’ll be doing a panel on online community with a bunch of great folks including Brad McQuaid of EverQuest, Toby Ragaini of Asheron’s Call, Mike Sellers formerly of Meridian 59, Jonathan Baron formerly of Kesmai and Air Warrior, Dr Amy Bruckman of MediaMOO, and of course Amy Jo Kim. That should be an all-day thing and quite a lot of fun. I’m reprising the usual roundtable on the Laws of Online World Design with Rich Vogel, and also doing a production lecture.

As part of the tutorial panel, Amy B. was doing slides on history of muds, and it set me on an obsessive tear this weekend. So if you look under Gaming/Misc Writings you’ll find a timeline of important events in the history of development of muds, MMORPGS, and whatever else you choose to call them.

My CD should be getting released by MP3.com in the next week or so. So for all three of you out there who want it, keep an eye out on my artist page there for more info.

A special poke in the ribs goes out to Brad, by the way, for saying in his interview with CGW that he’d pick me to play Aradune in the EverQuest movie. I dunno, Brad, I just don’t see how audiences would go for that… after all, you look soo… California. And I don’t. : Oh well, I imagine that at least Mark Asher (who did the interview & who does Game Spin over at Gamecenter) laughed–I doubt the rest of the world got the joke. Mark, next time footnote the interview. 🙂

GDC

 Posted by (Visited 12220 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
Mar 261999
 

GDC went great, loads of fun. Lots of attendance at the various online game sessions, including the ones I ran. I picked up several new laws from Jonathan Baron which are now on the Laws page, and I spent a lot of time hanging out with the guys who are doing Asheron’s Call. Also added a few laws of my own to the page.