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 vague game idea

    Hours Categories Gamemaking
    Comments 83 Comments

    I don’t know why, but it came to me as a picture, a bit over a week ago: a bird made of light, flapping on a screen with hand-drawn artwork. It trailed a few particles of light as it flapped, mostly white, but some of them pink or pale blue. What was interesting about it was the flapping, the way in which it had to twitch one wing in order to slide sideways against the wind currents and the gravity.

    Say, rather, that YOU had to twitch one wing. It was a game about flying by flapping. What you did, I wasn’t sure — collected stuff from the world, avoided collisions — whatever made sense for a game about flapping. The key thing was the sensation of flapping and flying — perhaps because I have been playing a lot of Joust both on XBox Live and on my phone.

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  • Flash mobs

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 17 Comments

    Ths interesting history of the term “flash mob” struck me as funny because one of the first ones we had within UO looked just like the engraving: a bunch of players showed up and mooned Lord British as a form of protest.

    The city where it happened? Moonglow, of course.

    Flash mob image

  • Misunderstanding customers

    Hours Categories Game talk, Watching
    Comments 38 Comments

    This article on how TV execs want to stop you from skipping commercials is a great example of misunderstanding customers.

    Mike Shaw of ABC says,

    “I’m not so sure that the whole issue really is one of commercial avoidance. It really is a matter of convenience–so you don’t miss your favorite show…People can understand in order to have convenience and on-demand (options), that you can’t skip commercials.”

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  • The Marketing MMO

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 18 Comments

    Another entrant into the social online space sweepstakes: NightLife Interactive Gaming, yet another club-themed space, aimed primarily at women. (The old club-operation adage: “get the women in the door, and the men will follow.”) The thing that caught my eye about this one, however, was their overall approach:

    And as you might guess–with a game being developed by a marketing firm–there’s another objective, at least for the game’s makers. In Touch has filed a patent application for a form of “seamless,” in-game product placement that lets players click on items and receive an e-mail from the advertiser, with no interruption in the game.

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  • 15,000,000,000,000

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 23 Comments

    That’s a lot of gold pieces. Gold pieces deleted from UO, that is. Apparently some sort of exploit involving large checks.

    It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the economy with this action. The currency was presumably being hoarded for some reason (else it’d be in smaller denominations than 1,000,000 checks? Or not… see below), so it was largely illiquid. But presumably some amount of this cash was then getting broken up for use on the in-game markets.

    It looks like 10,000,000 goes for around $14 these days on eBay. So this was a police action removing $1.5m dollars. Edit: I forgot to multiply by $14. Oops. I guess that puts it at $21,000,000. Good catch, Amaranthar!

    And a quick scan of the top auctions seems to show that 10m is the smallest typical amount purchased — all of a sudden checks for 1,000,000gp don’t seem extravagant — they seem like dollar bills.