New stuff on the site

I really have been neglecting the blog lately. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been adding content to the site all along. I figured it might not hurt to do a little summary of items that have been added over the last year and a half or more. The last talk I posted up was my GDC talk from 2024!

So, here’s a bit of a catalog…

For folks who are interested in the history of Ultima Online, I finally gathered up the various snippets I have posted about why exactly the original ecology system didn’t survive to release. There’s a theory out there that it happened because players were like locusts and killed everything and caused it to collapse, and that’s not quite correct. Players were like locusts. But the ecology system came out of the game for economic reasons and for performance reasons. So if you’re curious, you can read the answer to “did players destroy the UO ecology?” here.

I have done a lot of podcast interviews over the last while. Mostly, these end up on the Interviews and Panels page, but I haven’t been calling attention to them here. So here’s a list in chronological order… you’ll notice the rise of “metaverse fever!”

• An MMORPG.com interview from 2022 that is all about MMOs and what the hell a metaverse even is. This one has video!
• Naavik cornered me on The Metacast to talk about game design, Playable Worlds, player-driven economies, and more.
• At the GDC Showcase in 2023, Game Developer senior editor Bryant Francis interviewed me for a “game design career” fireside chat.
• Famed game devs Alex Seropian (founder of Bungie, Wideload, Industrial Toys) and Aaron Marroquin (Art Director, Game Designer, part time magician) have a great podcast called The Fourth Curtain where they interview devs. It was my turn back in the day.
• I got to share the stage with Wagner James Au and Cory Ondrejka at Gamesbeat and get real about the practical steps towards a metaverse of any sort.
• But not everything was about metaverses! The Here’s Waldo podcast instead wanted to talk about indie studio startups. So here’s a great conversation with Lizzie Mintus about that.
• If you are more interested in some stuff about Stars Reach and game design, this recent interview with grokludo gets nice and crunchy on design topics.

The last major talk I gave was on “The Evolution of Online Worlds,” and I managed to share it social media and never talk about it here. It was filmed, and video as well as PDFs of the slides are available here.

There’s some other stuff too — for example, I did a lot of work around emulation a few years ago, and I finally collected a lot of those materials here, so if you need Vectrex overlays, or want to play the Microvision again, or are baffled by Atari 8 bit computer emulation, you find find some stuff to read on the Emulation page.

I’ll make the usual promise here to be better about keeping the blog updated, but… we’ll see. I haven’t even been good about posting updates on Stars Reach here!