Recommended posts, 2017-2025

Game talk

It’s been over five years since the last time I gathered up recommended posts in one place and added them to the menu above. I figured I was due.

As usual this will include talks and interviews as well as articles. Just think of it as “my take on what the best stuff to look at on the site is.”

Previous collections of recommended posts can be found under the Blog heading on the menu bar or at these links:

Game design overviews

All of these posts are about game design in general and tend to cover big swaths of similar territory.

Multiplayer game design

These posts are all specifically about dealing with multiplayer game dynamics.

Other game design topics

The games business

These posts are about the games business and how we as developers get along within it.

  • Some current game economics is a response to gamer questions about why the business of games looks like it does. Even though it is years old, everything in there is pretty much still true.
  • The cost of games is a detailed breakdown of the costs involved in game development using data from 1985 to today, which then draws conclusions about what that means for players and for developers.
  • Industry Lifecycles is a talk version of the above, which also describes the the cyclical nature of game platforms.
  • The evolution of ‘gamers’ is a description of the way the term “gamer” and what target market is references has evolved from the 1970s to today.

Postmortems and history

As always, there was a decent amount of stuff posted to the blog that answered questions about older games. I should probably specifically call out that my book Postmortems came out during this time period and collects 700+ pages of virtual world history.

There were a bunch for Ultima Online specifically:

And there’s a few more things that are of historical interest:

Riffs by Raph

These posts were basically written as marketing for Playable Worlds and our game Stars Reach. However, they also serve as a pretty good manifesto for what I think MMOs ought to be like.

Metaverse madness

There was a huge boom in interest in the Metaverse during this time period. And frankly, most people had no clue what the hell they were talking about, or had very little idea how online worlds and therefore metaverses would even work. Sooooo…

First was a series on how they work from a data point of view, aimed particular at folks who thought blockchains solved all the issues. Hint: they don’t.

Then there were a series of panels, talks, and podcasts which touched on everything from governance in a metaverse to the hard realities of building one. Trivia: did you know the first one was built during the 90s? I built one during the 2000’s!

Emulation stuff

I did a fair bit of work on emulators during this period. There is much more than just these three things, but these seemed like the most worthy of calling out.