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.

  • The Game Bookosphere

    Hours Categories Game talk, Reading
    Comments 9 Comments

    At the center is game design; from there the other disciplines attach.
    Based on Amazon data. Click for the huge version.

    OK, so that TouchGraph tool is addictive. This time, I used it to find the core books of game development. I started with my own book, of course, and worked outwards. For every new book that popped up, I double-clicked it to expand its links as well, unless it wasn’t actually a game related book in some fashion.

    I then went through and color-coded regions of the graph, because it was interesting to me to see where things overlapped and where they didn’t. In the small version here, it can be hard to see some of the regions — I didn’t label them all. But in the big version you can see the many categories I imposed. 🙂

    Some things I thought were interesting:

    Game studies and serious games, however marginalized it may have seemed over on the blogosphere graph, is well-represented in the publishing world.

    Read More “The Game Bookosphere”

  • The MMO blogosphere map

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 20 Comments

    Click to get a blown-up version with blog names.

    Inspired by Jeff Freeman’s list of the top 100 blogs for MMO gamers, I used TouchGraphGoogle to build a map of the immediate vicinity of the MMO gaming blogosphere.

    Method: I set the depth fairly low, and also set the minimum inbound links at 5 so that I started with only blogs that have fair amount of other blogs pointing to them. I used here, Zen of Design, Broken Toys, and Psychochild as immediate starting nodes. Then as new nodes appeared, I kept going outwards until they were no longer relevant to MMOs.

    Lots of gaming news sites appeared, as did actual game sites and developers. I dropped those from the map as they appeared. If a site wasn’t predominantly “bloggy” I tended to drop it, with the exception of the few remaining all-MMO forum sites. A large chunk of map went away when I dropped links to Joel Spolsky and Lawrence Lessig even though they were “in the orbit” so to speak. Leaving out news blogs like Kotaku and Joystiq cleaned up the graph immensely — just assume that most of the game-centric sites linked to them.

    Of interest is the way that the graph quickly gets into game studies as you head northeast. Northwest is where it would link to the rest of the techie web; Many to Many is a social software site, for example, and that’s where Joel on Software, Lessig, and so on lived before I zapped them. Southwest is clearly player land, and devs occupy the center.

    A notable feature is the way that the first few Second Life blogs to pop up are clearly off to the side, not tied into the main MMO blog world. They connect via TerraNova, of course. I didn’t dig deeply into the SL side of the family — most likely, it would wrap around to the techie stuff that used to be in the northwest.

    It’s clear that finding the “center” of the MMO blogosphere would be impossible. There’s a ton of sites that fell below the minimum # of links threshold.And I bet if Brian, Scott, Damion & I all joined forces for a group blog, we could maybe earn a whole dollar a month off AdSense.