Game talk

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.

  • Losing MUD history

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 99 Comments

    QBlog writes on the controversy going on over the possible deletion of the article on Threshold MUD. I’ve run into the fact that Wikipedia isn’t a great resource for research into the history of virtual worlds many times before; the articles are of wildly uneven quality, and a recent crappy game can have pages and pages worth of content, whereas historically interesting stuff doesn’t.

    LegendMUD’s entry was deleted without even a debate a while ago, despite there being other articles that reference it and point to it, including a whole page on the Karyn affair. Worlds of Carnage has no page at all, despite it serving as the incubation place for scripting in DikuMUDs and for many developers who went on to work on the first wave of MMOs in the US. At least there’s a good DartMUD page.

    Curiously, I am used as a reference or citation many times in Wikipedia, yet I suspect my writings would not meet Wikipedia’s guidelines. The challenge here is creating material that does — with so much existing only as oral history or as community-driven sites, little will qualify to be in Wikipedia, with the result that the history is often lost.

    This is also the gripe I have about my own entry… very cool that I have one at all (though it came up for deletion once too! Morgan saved it) but it makes no real mention of why I should have one, which makes it read just like a resume. There’s no mention of game grammar, theory of fun, “worldy” MMORPGs, online game design patterns, the timeline, avatar rights, or community management — though it managed to find time to mention that I played MUME for a bit — even though I played dozens of muds as long as I played MUME.

    This isn’t just me being whiny about my entry… Bartle’s entry spends more time on whether he is controversial when discussing WoW, than on the core philosophical statement in his writings, which include the ideas that virtual worlds are means of self-discovery, and that they are artistic statements by designers.

    Now, I love Wikipedia, and use it all the time. But I am at a loss as to how to help out the Threshold entry, or in general help the cause of VW history there. This sort of thing is why people (ahem) end up setting up their own timelines instead. 🙂

  • Revisiting the Laws

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 4 Comments

    No, not me. Razakius, over at Razakius.com, who is working on what looks like an ongoing project to revisit every Law of Online World Design.

    This does happen every few years — someone decides to do a series revisiting them. I think this is healthy. The last new Law was “Socialization requires downtime,” which was a while ago.

    One of the nicest things about the Laws, I think, is that when you read them they are so clearly high level that so many of the little design cul-de-sacs the Diku genre has fallen into are obviously not applicable. Nobody has asked for “PvP is evil” or “PvP must always be in RvR form” or some such to be put on there, for example.

    On the other hand… never had to remove one yet, either. Not sure whether that is troubling or not!

  • Worlds.com patent suit hits NCSoft

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 36 Comments

    A while back I mentioned that Worlds.com had made known the intention to sue over their virtual world patents.

    Now the other shoe has dropped, as Virtual Worlds News reports that they filed suit against NCSoft on Christmas Eve.

    The patents in question deal with the notion of network culling on the server in 3d worlds, trimming down the set of things sent to the client based on server-side visibility algorithms.

    Worlds.com really is a pioneer in the space — WorldsAway Worlds Chat being one of the early VW systems in the first half of the 90s. The earliest forms of the patents were filed in 1996, so pretty much all of the big 3d MMOs are later.

    That said, there’s still plenty of earlier work done on network culling and yes, even 3d, and of course there’s a lot of money at stake, so expect a fight.

  • The Experimental Gameplay Workshop call for submissions

    Hours Categories Game talk

    The Experimental Gameplay Workshop has issued its call for submissions for 2009. Jonathan Blow says

    It’s a two-hour showcase of unusual and cutting-edge game designs. Each designer gives a ten- or fifteen-minute presentation of each game, including a live demo.

    We’re now looking for submissions for the 2009 workshop, which will be happening in March. If you make unconventional kinds of games, I encourage you to apply. Or, tell your friends. Or do both.

    For me “telling your friends” means blogging it, so I did. 🙂

  • Laptops have overtaken desktops

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 37 Comments

    In another display of the ways in which the world of PC gaming is shifting, laptop shipments exceeded that of desktops for the first time ever in the third quarter of ’08.

    A big part of the reason? Netbooks, which are

    • skimpy on graphics hardware, and can’t run big AAA games
    • often don’t even have an optical drive from which to install big games
    • super-portable, thanks to small screens that have resolutions as low as 1/4 the resolution of a desktop monitor
    • fundamentally designed to be connected

    The shift here is notable, because it all speaks to convenience rather than immersion. Small bites, not big ones. In fact, the Acer Aspire One netbook was the #3 seller in consumer electronics, behind a 52 inch TV and the 8GB iPod.

    I was struck by the fact that there’s a whole song on the Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog DVD commentary musical “Commentary!” (uh… just go get it, it’s too hard to explain) that is about a game. Not Far Cry 2. Not Left 4 Dead. No, it was about Ninja Rope. Usually if our industry gets big shoutouts from other media, it’s for a AAA game… But they played Ninja Rope on an iPhone — a transitional device halfway between a phone and a netbook itself.

    Meanwhile… Amazon doesn’t even mention the PS3 and the 360 sales this holiday season, focusing instead on how the Wii dominated the charts; going into Xmas, there were as many Wiis in households as 360s and PS3s combined. Again — lower res, simpler controls, simpler games (which has some folks really mad!).

    I wonder what a true AAA game designed for a netbook would look like?