Gambling with the future
For some reason, Tide’s Horizon seems to be the only MMO blog talking about the possible impact of the US ban on online gambling. But he’s right, the implications are possibly far-reaching on virtual worlds.
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.
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10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your (online world)
This list of 10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website has plenty that is applicable to developing online games and game communities. I won’t bother to do the translation, because in most cases it’s very obvious.
What’s interesting is how much is different from the way online worlds do it. Is it that the Web world and the online world-world are so different? Or that we aren’t up to speed on current thinking? (After all the Web world moves at warp speed compared to the glacial pace of online world development.)
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Community relations, management, design, and governance
These four words mean different things, and frequently call for different talents and skillsets used by different people. And yet, they seem to get used interchangeably, and lumped into one person’s job. We should stop that.
“Management” means control. Yes, there’s degrees and degrees of control, there’s soft touches, and so on. But management, fundamentally, is about directing a group of people towards a stated goal. In the case of online services of all sorts, it means “keep them as customers.”
“Relations” means conversation. It’s about the relationship. Yes, there are “relationships” when you manage someone, and the enlightened manager knows her people. But the stated goal of a relationship is the other person — it’s about getting to know them for their own sake. It’s not about getting them to do what you want.
Read More “Community relations, management, design, and governance”
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Philip Rosedale at Picnic 06
Wonderland has Alice’s usual stellar liveblog job, this time of Wonderland: Philip Rosedale at Picnic 06. He says a lot of stuff that people following Second Life already know, but here’s some stats he shared:
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Seed fails to germinate
The experimental and quite different MMO Seed is closing its doors.
This is a real shame, as Seed had an aesthetic that was quite different from anything else currently out there. With a cel-shaded comic book look, and a game system heavily premised on non-combat roles and ongoing procedural narratives per character, Seed was definitely outside of the mainstream, but was shooting for mainstream-level production values.
Another one for the timeline, I suppose. 🙁