Randy Farmer (he of Habitat fame, and much more besides!) and Bryce Glass have been posting excerpts from their upcoming book Building Web Reputation Systems on a blog, and today’s has a great anecdote in it that hammers home all the math behind negative reputation systems.

“Hi! I see from your hub that you’re new to the area. Give me all your Simoleans or my friends and I will make it impossible to rent a house.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m a member of the Sims Mafia, and we will all mark you as untrustworthy, turning your hub solid red (with no more room for green), and no one will play with you. You have five minutes to comply. If you think I’m kidding, look at your hub-three of us have already marked you red. Don’t worry, we’ll turn it green when you pay…”

If you think this is a fun game, think again-a typical response to this shakedown was for the user to decide that the game wasn’t worth $10 a month. Playing dollhouse doesn’t usually involve gangsters.

– Building Web Reputation Systems: The Blog: The Dollhouse Mafia, or “Don’t Display Negative Karma”.

There’s whole rough drafts of chapters on the site — totally worth reading, pondering, absorbing, and using.

Gamespot has a writeup, and Damion has posted his slides. I missed the talk, but it sounds like it was a good one!

“The irony of being alone in an MMO is inescapable. Being a loner is OK, but feeling lonely is not.”–Schubert, on why even solo players care about a well-populated world.

via Old Republic dev discusses massively multiplayer loners – News at GameSpot.

Slides are here (in PPTX format).

Randomness has been part of games since their earliest inception — and when I say “earliest inception,” I mean deep into the unwritten Neolithic past. Game scholars sometimes point to The Royal Game of Ur as the earliest known game, and in a sense it is — but we also know of games from any number of Neolithic cultures that survived into the modern era, many of them documented by Stewart Cullin in a series of books for the Smithsonian, published in the early 20th century.

– Play This Thing! | Game Reviews | Free Games | Independent Games | Game Culture.

Go read, it is awesome.

Cory Doctorow’s next book has all sorts of interesting editions, including one with endpapers made from ephemera from friends of his. I went looking for papers to send him. Flipping through old notebooks and scratch pads, I found a 2000 word essay-cum-manifesto-cum-tirade that I do not recall writing. It’s fiery and jejune and I can tell I was in my early twenties.

So I am sending the five pages of legal pad, scribbled frantically and passionately on both sides. I barely remember being the guy who wrote it, at a time before the World of Warcraft mentions on TV and the casual games on the web, at a time when it seemed like the corporations were already plenty big, back when “designer” was not even a title you saw, or if it was seen it was not accorded much respect. I don’t even know if it was written for an audience or not. At times it seems to speak to listeners, and at times it sounds like I was talking to myself.

I’m also posting it here, not because I agree with everything that I thought all those years ago, and not because it’s deathless insight deserving of being brought into the light. No, I post it because I just turned 38 on Monday, and it seemed worth remembering that passion; because even though many of the problems the essay discussed have changed, and times have moved on, there are always plenty of folks who are in their early twenties themselves and are railing away, and maybe they could use the fiery jejune kindred spirit of the past to keep them company.

“The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games.”

– Eugene Jarvis

Game design is an art and a craft. From the craft aspect of it we know that it involves predictable patterns, specific elements and tools that are common; in a word, we learn that it is to an extent quantifiable. It is not alchemical and mysterious. It obeys principles which may or may not be articulated or understood by its practitioners.

It is also an art – and there are no arts that are not also crafts. That means that it also strives to bottle lightning, to capture Lorca’s duende; it strives to shatter barriers and to communicate, provide venues of discussion and new contexts, enlighten, or even merely entertain. It must innovate (even if only in the creators’ eyes) or it is not worthy of the name.

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This is awesome, and I will be signing up tonight and probably throwing one of my board game designs up there to try it out. The short form: CafePress for board game designers.

Their brief FAQ covers the basics.

At TGC, you can start selling your game with only the push of a button. There are no up-front fees, no contractural obligations, no distributors, and you don’t need a big publisher to decide your game will sell 10,000 units in the first year.

TGC is your dream made simple!

Why TGC? We’ve been in the game design/manufacturing industry for over 10 years and published many of our own titles. We’ve always specialized in small run games, but we did it only for ourselves. Over the years we’ve gotten hundreds of requests from other indie designers asking if we’d publish their games, and finally we realized that our process could be applied to games other than our own as well.

– The Game Crafter – Your game REALIZED – Home.

Looks like they handle not just boards and cards, but also sell a nice assortment of parts that can go into the game. Not as wide an array as I have in my prototype kit, but decent nonetheless.

Game Design Essentials: 20 RPGs on Gamasutra is an excellent and in-depth look at RPGs.

I do miss at least some mention of MUD or DikuMUD, rather than jumping direct to World of Warcraft as the sole exemplar there; almost all MMORPGs today draw from those roots. And there’s also a curious lack of mention of the influence of free-form stuff or more storytelling-based RPGs, even in pen & paper.

Still, an excellent article.

Earlier today I noticed that Theory of Fun was listed as “frequently bought with” Understanding Comics on Amazon. And also with Challenges for Game Designers, by Brenda Brathwaite and Ian Schreiber. I thought it was neat, I tweeted it, the end. Then I get replies piling in saying that it is because of Game Design Concepts, a cool thing that Ian is doing this summer: a free class in game design, conducted over the web by blog.

This blog is a course in game design (specifically, non-digital systems design).

• Tuition: none. This class is open to all.
• Prerequisites: none. It is my intention to make this course accessible to all levels of experience, while providing useful additional resources for those who are advanced.
• Schedule: Monday 6/29/2009 through Sunday 9/6/2009. Posts will be made twice per week. You can read them at your own pace. The course lasts ten weeks.
• Audience: anyone with an interest in game design. This includes students who are interested in game design; faculty who teach courses in game design and would like to compare course material; game developers with an interest in design or a desire to see an example of what students are being taught these days; or relatives of game designers who are curious about what these people do all day.

Course Description:

This course provides students with a theoretical and conceptual understanding of the field of game design, along with practical exposure to the process of creating a game. Topics covered include iteration, rapid prototyping, mechanics, dynamics, flow theory, the nature of fun, game balance, and user interface design. Primary focus is on non-digital games.

I am guessing this may be of interest to some who read this blog. Not sure how I missed it before!

The full log of a great Q&A session with Richard Bartle in Metaplace has been posted up on the Metaplace Forums. It was a wide-ranging discussion, attended by over 70 people. Richard’s dry wit was, as usual, on full display.

A typical, provocative, snippet:

[05/26/09 13:13:10] gguillotte: I’ve been watching procedurally generated content for a while. Love comes to mind, a PG MMO. What sort of impact is this going to have, where content generation is automated?

[05/26/09 13:13:45] Richard: it depends if the generation of the content is the game or is filler
[05/26/09 13:14:11] Richard: procedural content can work – I’ve spent many, many hours playing Rogue for example
[05/26/09 13:14:42] Richard: using procedural content to create a canvas for virtual worlds seems a perfectly rational thing to do
[05/26/09 13:15:22] Richard: however, the designer has to put their soul in it somewhere: either this is by modifying the procedural content or by creating the framework that creates it
[05/26/09 13:15:59] Richard: now the former is the traditional way for designers to speak to players; if a designer wants to speak through the content-generation rules, well
[05/26/09 13:16:12] Richard: that would be possible but we don’t have the vocabulary for it yet

[05/26/09 13:16:28] gguillotte: Thanks.

[05/26/09 13:16:31] Richard: that makes it an interesting time for us

[05/26/09 13:16:38] gguillotte: Indeed

[05/26/09 13:17:11] Richard: Metaplace is a similar thing, btw – we’ll see things here that we haven’t seen the like of before

[05/26/09 13:17:21] Cuppycake: (We already have!)

[05/26/09 13:17:24] Richard: which is why I’m so enthusiastic for it
[05/26/09 13:17:55] Richard: I don’t mean new worlds, I mean new ways of communicating through world creation

Gamasutra has a report from a GDC Canada session discussion the role of emotions in games — that is, a researcher who is not Nicole Lazzaro! And it sounds like a fun and meaty discussion.

The counter is fear, which can cause physiological responses due to the “fight or flight” impulse. Many people love that sensation: “Look at the prevalence of the horror movie; it’s everywhere. Look at horror games.”

“Surely there’s no harm in that? Well, actually, there is,” said Chandler: Scientists have recently determined that after sustained fear, bodies stop producing adrenaline and being producing cortisol, which begins to break down non-essential organs and tissues to feed vital organs, increasing pain, promoting heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity.

So, here we have “games can cause heart disease!” Though it should be noted, so can shock horror movies… or perhaps excessive rollercoaster riding.

There’s also a bit bolstering the arguments I made not long ago about how we have unconscious predispositions towards people and things that looks like people (such as avatars).

Speaking of which, there was a lengthy discussion on that topic on the latest “Shut Up. We’re Talking” podcast, which has led to even more debate and controversy.

Unfortunately, I think the SUWT crew missed the point a bit by saying “well, maybe mature or experienced gamers learn not to have these subconscious reactions.” Unfortunately, I don’t think that is true — any more than informed and mature people sail through those tests of their reaction times with photographs of people of mixed races. This is not an easy bias to remove…

A little bit ago there was a kerfuffle over an event in World of Warcraft that ended with female characters getting bunny ears put on their heads. This post isn’t about that — not directly, anyway.

Rather, it’s about the reaction that many users had regarding avatars, characters, and players, and the divides between them.

The key quote that sets me off is this one from Tobold:

Ultimately your avatar is just a playing piece, and reading too much into his gender or race, and then projecting real world politics onto that, can only be a bad thing.

Unfortunately, even if we wish it to be so (and indeed, much of game design demands that it be so, much of the time) it’s not actually humanly possible.

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