• Terra Nova: Gender differences in MMOs

    Hours Categories Game talk
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    The latest results from the giant EQ2 data research project came out a few days ago, and this time they center on gender. I’ll just point straight to the summary from Terra Nova:

    • Men are more driven to achieve within the game space, and women are more driven to socialize, although these differences are not as large as one might expect.
    • Female players fall into two distinct categories: stereotypically feminine players, typically brought into the game by a partner, and very hard-core players.
    • The hard-core women are more intense than their male counterparts: “The top 10% of male players played an average of 48.86 hours per week, while the top 10% of female players played an average of 56.64 hours per week.”
    • Female players are healthier offline than the males. This is especially true among older players.
    • When males and females play together within a romantic relationship, the males are less happy and the females more happy. When not playing in a romantic relationship, these outcomes are reversed: the females are less happy and the males more happy.
    • There are a surprisingly large number of bisexual females playing, but not males. While male bisexual players stuck to the national average, females were about five times higher than the national baseline rate.
    • Females under-report their playing time more than males.

    via Terra Nova: Gender differences in MMOs.

    The full paper can be gotten here (scroll down a bit) but you have to register or purchase it.

  • WebGL reaches draft standard form

    Hours Categories Game talk
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    Khronos has announced that its standard for deploying OpenGL in JavaScript has reached “draft standard” — which means that it is inviting comment from developers. There’s still a ways to go:

    But don’t hold your breath for Web-based first-person shooters that rival native applications. First, even if 3D is accelerated, there are plenty of other processing and user interface constraints on Web applications. Second, even after WebGL is standardized, it must be built into browsers, people must upgrade to those new versions, and programmers must learn how to support the technology.

    With draft standard, 3D Web closer to reality | Deep Tech – CNET News.

    That said, all the browser makers except Microsoft are backing the potential new standard (though Google has O3D going as well, of course).

    It might also breathe new life into VRML/X3D — there’s efforts afoot to marry the two.

  • Social & Online Games Summit at GDC

    Hours Categories Game talk
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    I’m the Summit Chair for the Social & Online Games Summit at GDC this year — what the old Worlds in Motion Summit has evolved into. Gamasutra has posted an article on the recently announced initial line-up.

    We’re trying to sit at the convergence of a few trends here: casual games moving online, online games moving social, and social games moving virtual, all of which are sort of happening at once, albeit at different speeds. It’s going to be a couple of years, I suspect, before this all shakes out, but it’s fascinating to watch. The Summit should be a lot of fun and highly interesting. We’re making a big point of trying to build bridges across these silos, with lectures and panels on things like adding social gaming elements to virtual worlds, migrating from AAA games to social games, migrating casual games to Facebook, etc.

    You can read more about the Summit here.

  • A few neat little games

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 3 Comments

    Just a quick post to note some games that have caught my eye lately. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen mention of some of these already.