Terra Nova has what apparently is T. L.’s last post, and it’s about player-centered design.

Is anyone (any company? any commercial enterprise?) integrating something roughly called “player-centered design” into their MMOG dev processes or is that wording the kind that makes the practicing designer cringe as it seems to undermine the artistic/auteur aspect of producing a game?

The first temptation is to answer “anyone who isn’t player-centered in their design is an idiot.”

After all, the entire discipline of design — and I don’t mean game design, I mean all of design — is about user responses. It’s about holding a conversation with the intended user of an artifact (I was going to type “product” there and then changed my mind), via the artifact itself.

And yet, I know that a lot of folks (such as the ones who typically bash me on, say, game or guild forums, will say that I’m far from being player-centered in my own designs. I’m a poster child for ignoring what players want, right?

The question, to my mind, is “where is the player, really?” and that’s not an easy question to answer.

Read More “Player-centered design”

…On the show “On Point.” The main guest is Heather Chaplin, who co-authored Smartbomb : The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution, which I discussed a while back.

Alas, this is at 8:00am Pacific time, and they do it live. Ugh, I will be up really early tomorrow morning. I’m told I’ll only be on for about 20 minutes for part of the conversation.

Edit: you can now listen to the show via Windows Media or RealPlayer.

It had to happen, and now there’s a startup trying it out: Multiverse. Read the CNet article here.

Edit: there’s also a TerraNova discussion, where the response is pretty positive.