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.

A Poke-roundup
July 19, 2016July 19, 2016 Game talk
My piece on how “AR is an MMO” traveled far and wide this week. Among the appearances:
- I wrote a follow-up entitled “I Really Did Mean MMO” that anyone who liked the first post would probably like.
- New World Notes asked me a few questions via Twitter DM, and the result was a little piece on what the game needs to keep thriving. I’ve played it a bunch more since, and have a completely different list at this point, but there it is if you’re interested.
- Gamasutra included a snippet in their list of “quotable bits about PokemonGO.” I was also one of several designers interviewed for a story on there about the past and future of AR games.
- It’s also in this week’s Critical Distance roundup.
- Several MMO sites discussed the post, including Massively Overpowered, Massively Overpowered again, Mein MMO (German), MMO.it (Italian), and MMORPG.com.
- So did a bunch of news sites, including El Pais (Spanish), Gamona.de (German), and NYMag — twice, once in a general article about the game, and again as one of the recommended reads in their roundup on “hot takes” on PokemonGO.
There’s probably more to come — I was asked about interviews by several outlets this week, and actually said yes to at least one, as I recall.

If you’re looking for more to read from a game-design specific angle, I recommend
Also, you may recall I mentioned that alternate client views is common in MMOs? Well, here’s your global map of where all the Pokemon are. If you can get in — it’s overloading with traffic.
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I really did mean “MMO”
July 14, 2016July 19, 2016 Game talk
10 Comments

A lot of people, as I expected, have focused on the semantics of whether or not “AR is an MMO.” Mostly, they say “well, you really mean ‘it’s like an MMO.'”

It isn’t really “like.” It actually “is.” I think people fall into the trap of thinking that the physical trumps the virtual, but that’s not the case. The virtual trumps the physical, or as Marc Andreessen puts it, software swallows everything.

Think of it this way: the phrase “geotagging” suggests that we are applying a small bit of virtual to the real. But that’s not what is happening at all. What’s actually happening is that we are building a truly massive digital world, and attaching a tiny piece of real to it, via a DB entry with a coordinate.

Currently, there are a zillion databases that hold this sort of data, siloed from one another, but the big project that Google and others have been engaged in for quite some time is to unify them. Amazon’s ASIN is a great example of one such scheme to unify “template IDs” for as many object types as they can. Put another way: the single largest database of “object types” in the world is Amazon’s, and to build it, they basically cloned the existing UPC and ISBN and other such similar databases, plus some, and unified them. They created a metaobject type that became the parent object type, only they own the address space.

Read More “I really did mean “MMO””

Read More I really did mean “MMO”
AR is an MMO
July 11, 2016July 14, 2016 Game talk
72 Comments

I’ve said this before, but in the wake of the viral success of Pokémon GO, it needs to be said again. Augmented reality is just a virtual world, an MMO, a MUD even, with all of the same design issues, plus a few new ones.

The goggles fallacy

I asked a high-powered Silicon Valley exec about the ethical implications of social VR and AR. Their response was “what ethical implications?”

To some, particularly vets of online worlds of various stripes, this may seem obvious. But most days, it feels like the average person working in social VR, AR, and the like, is ignorant of this. It’s evident in the very large pile of past lessons they are failing to heed in their designs.

Read More “AR is an MMO”

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The Limits of Formalism, my talk from BIRS
May 23, 2016May 23, 2016 Game talk
2 Comments

I spent last week up in the mountains around Banff, Canada, with a spectacular group of people, as we talked about “computational modeling of games.” This was a workshop held at the Banff International Research Station, or BIRS, and organized by Andy Nealen of NYU and Michael Mateas of UC Santa Cruz. As you may be able to tell from the title, it was moderately mathy, though I was assured by several of those there that it was dramatically less so than an actual mathematician would expect, and certainly less so than the other workshops in the series!

I was asked to give a “seed talk” on the question of “the limits of formalism.” The questions Michael and Andy asked me to answer were

What leverage does a formalist approach to game design give you? What might it leave out? What are the broad contours of the landscape of formalist game design theories? What intellectual commitments are formalist game designers making? What are the biggest holes in our current understanding of formalist approaches to game design?

Read More “The Limits of Formalism, my talk from BIRS”

Read More The Limits of Formalism, my talk from BIRS
My Cycle of Life talk from Helsinki
May 2, 2016 Game talk
2 Comments

I just got back from a week in Helsinki, Finland. I was there to run some game design workshops at Next Games, and do a lecture for them as part of an event they were hosting.

The request was for a talk of a similar shape to the one I gave at GDC: looking back over the history of games over the last couple of decades, identifying some cycles and trends, and discussing the ways in which those cycles were carrying us back again towards familiar territory. In particular, a huge topic of discussion all week, with many separate people from many different companies, was the way in which mobile gaming is discovering that the games need to be more social, more like games as a service; and more and more they find they must draw lessons from MMOs.

This isn’t that dissimilar to what I have been saying about social VR, either, and of course mobile is going to collide with AR given enough technological advances and time. So that was the skeleton of the talk.

Read More “My Cycle of Life talk from Helsinki”

Read More My Cycle of Life talk from Helsinki

Game talk

A Poke-roundup

I really did mean “MMO”

AR is an MMO

The goggles fallacy

The Limits of Formalism, my talk from BIRS

My Cycle of Life talk from Helsinki

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The goggles fallacy

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