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.
Jeff Ward has a great article on Gamasutra about the viability of the indie scene these days, which ties right back into the recent blog post on new bosses and old bosses. He analyzes iPhone, XBLA, and PC markets, as well as the alternative funding model of getting investors in advance for a title.
Niels Clark dropped by in the comment thread on the WoW addiction therapy guild to mention that Jim Rossignol has a detailed review of his new book Game Addiction: The Experience and the Effects.
What this means is that Game Addiction is damning of “grind” heavy games. At times, it seems like Clark is betraying his “not anti-games” by painting a deliberately bleak pictures of traditional MMOs. He’s quick to nod towards the complexity of these clever multiplayer constructs, and the positive side-effects of social gaming, but I couldn’t help feeling that grind-based games are beginning to become their own worst enemies when subjected to this kind of scrutiny. It seems like an impossible task to come away with a truly positive picture of their game model, and the way we gamers behave when playing them. They are not games that encourage balance in our lives.
via Rock, Paper, Shotgun: “Don’t push me because I’m close to the…” » Book: Game Addiction.
The discussion thread, needless to say, gets kind of contentious. Sounds worth picking up though!
The wild frontier of the Web for game and app distribution is rapidly looking a lot like the old landscape. The biggest challenge is distribution: the power to get your game in front of users. A lot of folks look to the centralized distribution available on things like the iPhone’s App Store or using Facebook’s apps infrastructure. But as noise rises, you need clout to get seen in the midst of an endless sea of apps.
And the answer to that? A powerful distribution network in the hands of an aggregator. In short, a company that has the funds to commission games and spend heavily to advertise them, to cross-promote them with their other titles (and get economies of scale on that marketing dollar), and to make their titles rise above the noise. In other words, a publisher. Take Zynga, for example:
“We do spend a lot of money on advertising when we want to, like when we launched Farmville,” Pincus said. “We spent a couple million dollars advertising it and we’re not shy about that.”
via Social Game Developers Spending Millions on Facebook Advertising.
That’s more in marketing alone than most apps have in development budget. Possibly more than their makers have in total funding.
An addiction therapist is forming a WoW guild so that he can reach the addicted where they live: on raids.
He has called on Blizzard Entertainment, the company that makes World of Warcraft, to waive or discount the costs associated with joining the game so that therapists can more easily communicate with at-risk players in their preferred environment.
“We will be launching this project by the end of the year. I think it’s already clear that psychiatrists will have to stay within the parameters of the game. They certainly wouldn’t be wandering around the game in white coats and would have to use the same characters available to other players,” said Dr Graham.
“Of course one problem we’re going to have to overcome is that while a psychiatrist may excel in what they do in the real world, they’re probably not going to be very good at playing World of Warcraft.
“We may have to work at that if we are going to get through to those who play this game for hours at end.”
via Addiction therapists signing up to World of Warcraft – Telegraph.
Gosh, I hope they don’t get addicted.
Virtual Worlds News has been following the story. Apparently ExitReality bought the assets (meaning, the vSide tech and IP, so they are the new operators). Then Doppelganger disbanded as an entity. Then a bit later, some the people from Doppelganger resurfaced at a new company called Real Life Plus.
There’s some screenshots (looks like prerendered concept art) from this new project on their Facebook page.
No word from ExitReality on what exactly they are going to be doing with the vSide assets. They have their own client and server tech based on X3D, so presumably they are mostly interested in the assets and the vSide userbase.
