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.

  • AGDC08: Measuring & Metrics

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 3 Comments

    Measuring & Metrics: the Online Gaming Audience, Edward Hunter, Comscore

    (these are just rough notes, not a liveblog transcript).

    Gamers used to be 18-24 males, now there are online gamers in every demographic. Exponential increase in spend for advertising to reach the gamer. 9 out of ten calls to ComScore are about ads.

    Metrics asked for:
    – reach and frequency
    – genre prefs by demographic
    – market size
    – demographics: ideal targets for a game
    – exposure targets — how many did you reach, what is the kind & level of engagement? What actions do they take? (Do they interact with the ad or just see it there but focus more on the game?)
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  • Virtual worlds in the ambient cloud

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 22 Comments

    The Web is moving towards a user-centric experience. Whereas a few years ago, it was all about visiting destination sites, now it is about destination sites spitting out data that comes to you, via RSS. The attraction of things like Twitter or Facebook lies in the ambient information that flows out and about, and in your largely asynchronous, largely placeless, largely shallow updates on what your friends are doing. You come to know them deeply not by engaging deeply with them, but by building up pictures of lots of small actions they take.

    Compare, for example, the destination-like IRC versus the ambient Twitter. Hardcore Twitter fans use it almost in realtime. They answer people, with their @fred syntax convention. They have a better history, perhaps, because they can search the stream in a way that IRC doesn’t really support. But more importantly, you follow Twitter by filtering it; it’s one big stream, and you take little bits of it out. It is as if IRC were all one channel, and you happened to build an aggregate channel of just the people talking that you wanted to hear.

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  • New major study on MMO players

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 35 Comments

    Dmitri Williams has released the first paper from an initiative that I helped get off the ground years ago, before leaving SOE. Basically, SOE gave him full (anonymized) logs of activity for EQ2.

    Some key findings:

    1. the largest concentration of players are in their 30s
    2. There are more players in their 30s than in their 20s
    3. Older players also play more than younger players
    4. Female players play slightly more hours per week than male players
    5. EQ2 players come from wealthier backgrounds than average, & are also more educated than the general population
    6. have substantially different levels of spirituality than the general population, particularly are far less likely to be Christian and much more likely to state they have no religion compared to the general US population
    7. Physically, EQ2 players are healthier than the regular population. So much for the overweight geek stereotype
    8. However, they have lower indicators for mental health — particularly for depression
    9. the desire to get ahead (“achievement”) and the desire to spend time with others both predicted increased playing, whereas the desire for immersion was a predictor of playing less

    More papers will be coming — they had to goto NCSA supercomputers to crunch the terabytes of data! — and I look forward to seeing what else emerges.

  • How Metaplace was born

    Hours Categories Gamemaking
    Comments 1 Comment

    I got asked where the idea for Metaplace came from on our public forums. I wrote this lengthy reply, which turned into a blog post over there, and now a blog post over here.

    I came from the world of muds. That means I got my start in virtual worlds in the days when anyone could download a codebase, and assuming they had a server they could get going and dive into running a world of their own.

    That went away with the big MMORPGs. But when we did UO: The Second Age, there had already been a movement among players towards having “grey shard” server emulators. Some of the tools users had made to hack the UO datafiles were actually better than the tools we had in-house.

    So I informally floated an idea for the expansion that didn’t go anywhere. Why not release the game server as a binary, release documentation for our scripting language (which was fantastic for the time), release our tools client, and let people make their own worlds?

    You will have to go over there for the rest. 🙂