This is the catch-all category for stuff about games and game design. It easily makes up the vast majority of the site’s content. If you are looking for something specific, I highly recommend looking into the tags used on the site instead. They can narrow down the hunt immensely.
Offworld spotted (or helped create?) this one.
Clearly, there’s a line in these. We’ve seen Quake and Pac-Man. How about Super Mario, Joust, M.U.L.E., Defender, Chu-Chu Rocket, and Command & Conquer next please?
I still pay a lot of attention to social networking theory (not the stuff about the sites, but the research around how humans form networks of influence), ever since doing all the research that led up to my 2003 “Small Worlds” presentation. So this Reuters report that scientists have found a genetic component to having tight friend clusters was interesting to me.
To dig into what’s going on here a little bit: social networks are very discontinuous. They “clump.” We know from datamining that some people have many friends and some have few. The ones who have many are often referred to as hubs or connectors. These folks are also often the ones that “bridge clumps.” And when we say they have friends, we mean, like, they have a crazy amount more than ordinary people do. (The distribution of “number of friends” follows a power law, so the folks at the high end are very very very rich with friends, to a radically disproportionate level).
I suppose it isn’t surprising to think that there is likely some genetic component to this aspect of it. Most people are not like those guys. Read More ““Connectors” and “hubs” may be genetically inclined”
Metaplace has an official Twitter account now! Feel free to follow. 🙂
The case against Candy Land is a BoingBoing post by Steven Johnson, author of many wonderful books (and fellow roundtable-ee for that Harper’s piece a long while ago).
In it, he points out that many classic kids’ board games are built primarily on randomness, not skill. He even goes after Battleship:
…Yes, at the very end, you might adjust your picks based on your knowledge of which ships you’ve sunk. But for the most part, it’s about as mentally challenging as playing Bingo.
And Battleship might as well be Battleship Potemkin compared to something like Candy Land, which was fiendishly designed to prevent the player from ever having to make a single decision while playing the game. You pick a card from a shuffled deck, and follow the instructions. That’s it.
I realize that games of pure chance have a long history, but that doesn’t make them any less moronic.
A lot of kids’ games aren’t as dumb as they seem — I often cite Chutes and Ladders as a game with a deep lesson in it, though one we learn quickly and then take for granted. (It has a discontinuous map with “hyperjumps” between positions; you could even take it as a training tool for “black swan” events if you want to get lofty about it). 🙂
I think Steven is underselling Battleship a bit; I used it to demonstrate to my kids how well-organized search grids usually destroyed their random selections (I prefer a slanted grid with an interval of 3; I usually spiral it rather than proceed top to bottom). Not to mention that the psychology of estimating your opponent’s skill in ship placement does indeed matter.
But I always hated Candy Land.
The Metaverse Journal has a new interview with me up. It’s all about Metaplace, the industry (games and virtual worlds), and what my five desert island discs would be. They call me an “elder statesman,” and then comment I probably wouldn’t like that, and they’re right. 😉
In re-reading the answers, there’s one minor correction I want to make:
Lowell: As a writer, has anything recently in virtual worlds stood out for you as high-quality writing?
Raph: To be honest, I don’t think that writing has ever been a huge part of social virtual worlds. It’s had far far more of a presence in the RPGs, where it is really starting to get much better.
That should, of course, be “a huge part of graphical social virtual worlds” — since writing was the key form of expression in the text-based ones! (Also, I am not minimizing the good writing work some are doing — it just doesn’t seem to be a major current in the field right now).
