Int posted in the comment threads here mentioning that he has imported the entire MUD-Dev archive into a PHPBB forum. This means that now you can read the discussion in threaded format, sorted by date. This is awesome! Thanks for your contribution to the community, Int! It’s available at http://muddev.wishes.net.
Here’s my speaking schedule at GDC:
Descriptions:
So Microsoft is doing a contest to encourage people to raise their Gamerscores.
But somehow, it feels like they have the incentive wrong.
Thomas Malaby has an interesting post on ganking over at terra Nova in which he suggests that ganking isn’t a game, because there’s no challenge, and that gankers are effectively “ducking the question” by not really participating in the game structures. (Ganking is defined as “someone powerful attacking someone weak.”) The article seems primarily influenced by the sort of ganking that occurs in World of Warcraft.
I’m speculating that ganking happens when a player who does not want to be challenged to play a game (i.e., encounters where the outcome is contingent), instead opts to do something where the outcome is a foregone conclusion: kill a player that is vastly lower in capabilities. If meaning is found at the meeting point of inherited systems of interpretation (cultural expectations) and the performative demands of singular circumstances (something I talked about here), then ganking is a denial of that meaning. It is a retreat from the demands of the new, and it signals a disposition that does not want to be performatively challenged. Ganking lower level players is, then, a somewhat pathetic attempt to feel, well, something.
Nate Wienert alerts me to his project GameGum, another “YouTube for Games” site. It’s been around for a year, aggregates Flash games, and most interestingly, does revenue sharing with those who upload games by splitting the AdSense revenue from a given game’s earnings. Up to 50% can go to the most popular games. The suite of community tools seems fairly complete: ratings, reviews, favorites, and so on. The now-ubiquitous Digg-like “fresh list” is right there on the front page.
At this point, the whole Flash game sharing site thing seems to me to be getting a little crowded. 🙂 What’s interesting to me is that so many of these seem able to sustain a viable community.
