• Some zone design lessons

    Hours Categories Game talk, Gamemaking
    Comments 11 Comments

    We’re laying out Metaplace Central again. We have iterated it a lot, as we try out different flows, add new tech that makes it more appealing, and so on. These days, what with the balloons, the board games on the table by the cafe, and the many teleporters to user worlds, layout is growing more challenging as we strive to both fit everything in and also make it a social space.

    Musing on these problems not only made me dig out my copy of A Pattern Language but also reminded me of how 8 years ago I did a brief examination of the maps of two popular cities in what were then two popular MMOs: Ultima Online and EverQuest. These days, the science of zone layout has improved a lot.

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  • IndieCade call for submissions!

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 3 Comments

    Celia writes,

    IndieCade Call for Submissions:

    IndieCade invites independent game artists and designers from around the world to submit interactive media of all types – from art to commercial, ARG to abstract, mind-bending to mobile, serious to shooter, as well as academic and student projects – for consideration. Work-in-progress is encouraged.

    A diverse jury of creative and academic leaders will select entries for top prizes at the IndieCade 2009 Festival. All entries for the Festival will also receive consideration for presentation at all 2009 IndieCade international exhibitions including:

    IndieCade 2009 Events:
    IndieCade @ E3, Los Angeles (June 2-5)
    IndieCade Asia TBA
    IndieCade @ SIGGRAPH, New Orleans (Aug 5-7)
    IndieCade 2009 (Oct 1-10)
    IndieCade Europe, GameCity, UK (Oct 26-29)

    Submissions Deadline: April 30, 2009 at Midnight PST.

    For more information and to enter: www.IndieCade.com.

    IndieCade’s successful flagship 2008 festival held last October at Open Satellite contemporary gallery in Bellevue, Washington, was the first major intertaional exhibition of independent videogames and videogame art in the area. Event organizers include IndieCade Founder Stephanie Barish, Chair Celia Pearce, and Festival Director Sam Roberts.

  • YoVille bigger than WoW in NA?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 36 Comments

    Back in July of 2008, I pointed out YoVille, a Facebook MMO that runs as an app. Back then, it had 150,000 daily uniques.

    Today, I’m here to tell you that YoVille is almost certainly more popular than WoW in North America.

    The Top 25 Facebook Games for March 2009 and The Top 25 MySpace Games for March 2009 are a pair of posts over at the Inside Social Games blog. And what do they say? That YoVille has 2.26m users on MySpace and 4.46m on Facebook. And yes, these are monthly uniques.

    Now, there is probably some overlap between the stats on the two services. And there is little doubt that WoW makes a lot more money, and is a lot more game.

    But we should not be quick to discount this. More game and better art can be added. YoVille is a virtual world: it has avatars, money, inventory and housing. It has embedded games. It has a map. It has chat and persistence. And it’s in Flash. Oh, and they picked up 1m users in the last month.

    Amid all the hoopla over whether there is room to go around WoW, here’s an answer.

  • Recent neuroscience summed up

    Hours Categories Game talk, Reading
    Comments 9 Comments

    Every once in a while, I get asked about doing an updated version of Theory of Fun. I generally reply that not only do I not have time, but that there’s fairly little that seems to merit updating. Plenty has moved on the political front, but science moves more slowly, and so most of the stuff that the book references as its underpinnings hasn’t seen any radical changes.

    Then again, the book doesn’t dive all that deeply into some of it. I think the only reference to dopamine happens in the end notes, even though it’s central to the statement that fun doesn’t equal flow. (Arguably, the better update would be to surface that stuff more in the book…)

    Well, the science does move some, and iHobo has a pair of great summary articles on Why You Play Games and The Biology of Compulsion which sum up quite a lot of the recent research on all this. Not only is it a handy reference, but there’s also a pointer towards the forthcoming book Beyond Game Design: Nine Steps Towards Creating Better Videogames, with articles by Bateman, Lazzaro, Bartle, Isbister, and others. My pre-order is in!