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 Bartle lead in the NYT?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 11 Comments

    Yep, check it out.

    “So you have these four basic types that occupy the environment: the Achiever, the Explorer, the Socializer and the Killer.”

    Nick Fortugno, the 30-year-old teacher, turned away from the whiteboard and faced the 14 undergraduate and master’s-level students in his Thursday seminar. “Killers act like predators, and like any ecosystem, if you increase the number of killers and facilitate them, you decrease the number of achievers and socializers.”

    I’m sure that right about now, RIchard chimes in wondering why nobody uses his newer model, found in his book…

  • Recent site fixes

    Hours Categories Game talk, Misc, Music
    Comments 2 Comments

    The following fixes have been made:

    • The essays and presentations have been split onto two separate pages.
    • The GDC presentation on Online World Design Patterns is now back on the site. This presentation covers the basic common characteristics of MMOs and MUDs: what characters are like, what game systems are common, etc. IE-only, for now.
    • Also back is How to Manage a Large-Scale Online Gaming Community. This presentation is often misread as cynical manipulation of customers. Well, it is some of that, but it’s also intended to be a blueprint for honest dealings with your community. Also IE-only for now.
    • Two Models for Narrative Worlds has slightly changed URLs (it is now an SHTML file) and is no longer one of those fancy JavaScript IE-only presentation webpages, but instead a single page of PNGs with the transcript of the talk interspersed. Over time, I hope to change all of the presentations to this format, since most folks who visit here use Firefox (as do I!).
    • The snippet “Online worlds and the law” is back on the site — it just had a bad filename.
    • Same with “The ethics of online world design”. Neither of these pages, as with several others of the snippets, look correct yet, but at least the material is restored.
    • The sheet music for “Alice” and “Memorial” should be legible again.

    Since we’re here — what needs to change about the site? What’s working? What do you hate? What do I need to blog about more? Feedback is welcome.

  • Two interesting posts at Only a Game

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 2 Comments

    The Rituals of Alea and A Game Design Grammar. Just noting them, really. I think chance and randomness are incredibly important in games, but that they only do more than teach probability when they exist within a larger context; and that there’s alot of folks out there using the grammar metaphor right now and we need to pin down what we mean a bit better. 🙂

  • Terra Nova: MMOG eSport?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 5 Comments

    Terra Nova: MMOG eSport? asks the question of whether MMOGs are amenable to eSports.

    Are they good as spectator sport? Would something have to be tweaked in the genre (and in the whole field of play around it) to make them so. And even then, would it be an interesting or good idea?

    It’s sort of an odd question to ask, in some ways, given the history of the genre. Arguably, the games started out with a heavy degree of sport built in. The early games that were full-reset or “Groundhog Day” MUDs had a degree of inspiration from games such as Zork. The core mechanic of an early AberMUD, for example, involved gathering items from around the game and bringing them back to a pool where they were dumped; you earned XP for doing so; in the original Zork, you gathered items from around the game and returned them to a trophy case in the small white house.
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  • A Sad Turn of Events…

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 2 Comments

    If you’ve been looking for LegendMUD or the old version of the website, this may explain where it’s gone:

    On the morning of 11/20, Legend experienced what can only be described as a catastrophic failure. The controller which manages all of the peripheral drives failed, taking it with the logic boards on the hard drives as well as the CD ROM drive. It was a shock as well to find that the off-machine/off-site backup procedures had also been silently failing.

    Attempts at recovering the data have thus far been unsuccessful.

    Read More “A Sad Turn of Events…”