game design

  • Avatars aren’t tokens

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 38 Comments

    A little bit ago there was a kerfuffle over an event in World of Warcraft that ended with female characters getting bunny ears put on their heads. This post isn’t about that — not directly, anyway.

    Rather, it’s about the reaction that many users had regarding avatars, characters, and players, and the divides between them.

    The key quote that sets me off is this one from Tobold:

    Ultimately your avatar is just a playing piece, and reading too much into his gender or race, and then projecting real world politics onto that, can only be a bad thing.

    Unfortunately, even if we wish it to be so (and indeed, much of game design demands that it be so, much of the time) it’s not actually humanly possible.

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  • All-Everquest Game Studies issue

    Hours Categories Game talk

    Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research has published a special issue, EQ: Ten Years Later. Among the articles:

    • Nick Yee on “Befriending Ogres and Wood-Elves: Relationship Formation and The Social Architecture of Norrath”
    • Greg Lastowka on “Planes of Power: EverQuest as Text, Game and Community”
    • Sal Humphreys on “Norrath: New Forms, Old Institutions”
    • Lisbeth Klastrup on “The Worldness of EverQuest: Exploring a 21st Century Fiction”
    • Bart Simon, Kelly Boudreau, & Mark Silverman on “Two Players: Biography and “Played Sociality” in EverQuest”
    • Eric Hayot and Edward Wesp on “Towards a Critical Aesthetic of Virtual-World Geographies”

    There are also interviews with Chris Lena (with whom I worked in the R&D group at SOE back in the day, and who was producer on EQ for years); and with Brad McQuaid and Kevin McPherson. The interviews don’t appear to be recent, but they still give some great insight.

    BMQ: Back when designing EverQuest and coming up with the various playable races, we looked at the more human-like races and decided purposely to make them in appearance similar to real world races. This is true also for the architecture, a lot of the background, etc. But the important point is that what we were trying achieve was familiarity. In other words, the Barbarians in EQ might have had a Scottish flavor to them, but they are not Scots; likewise the pyramids on Luclin might appear to be Egyptian in flavor or style to a degree, but there is no real relationship. This allows the game designer (or fantasy author, for that matter) to create races, cultures, architectures, etc. that draw on the richness of the real world in terms of depth, without actually being constrained by actual real life history or stories or, hopefully, if done right, too many preconceived stereotypes.

  • How David Beats Goliath — a lesson in game design

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 25 Comments

    Malcolm Gladwell’s latest article, “How David Beats Goliath,” is a must-read for anyone interested in game design. Or business strategy.

    It’s all about how underdog outsiders can come to a “game” (meaning, a formal structure of rules with win conditions) and because they are free of social preconceptions of how it “should” be played, can use unorthodox tactics to win. The article purports to be about game-playing strategy, but I think it has just as much to say about how you set up your rule systems as anything else.

    “Eurisko was exposing the fact that any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approximation of reality,” Lenat explained. “What the other entrants were doing was filling in the holes in the rules with real-world, realistic answers. But Eurisko didn’t have that kind of preconception, partly because it didn’t know enough about the world.” So it found solutions that were, as Lenat freely admits, “socially horrifying”: send a thousand defenseless and immobile ships into battle; sink your own ships the moment they get damaged.

    This is the second half of the insurgent’s creed. Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is “socially horrifying”—they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought.

  • Why Isn’t Money Points?

    Hours Categories Game talk, Reading
    Comments 16 Comments

    Mint.com is a personal finance site that won the judges’ award at TechCrunch40 the same year that Metaplace won the audience award. It helps you do budgeting and other such dull tasks, all in slick interface.

    Despite the zillions of products out there to do this, we still managed to wheel, deal, and borrow ourselves into a financial crisis (that is still ongoing, though swine flu may be eclipsing it just now). Clearly, something was lacking in the appeal here, for if said product category were truly successful, we wouldn’t be in this fix.

    Now, Mint is in closed beta on a feature that turns personal finance into a game, complete with points earned for doing things like socking away some cash into the savings account each month, or switching to a credit card with annual rewards. Get enough points in a sustained way, and you too can be a Financial Guru.

    This seems like a fairly straightforward harnessing of game-style incentive systems towards a laudable goal (though I should note that said credit card with rewards is likely from one of Mint’s partners). But honestly — money is points anyway, isn’t it? Why is it that we value the cash less than the flat-screen TV?

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  • Richard Bartle’s IMGDC keynote

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 39 Comments

    …is quite wonderful. It basically makes the case that freeform play (and even user-created content) should be the elder game on top of a more directed and guided play experience — and that we don’t tend to see this because of historical divisions between player types.

    Here’s the PDF.

    PS, I’ve periodically gone digging to find the origin of the term “elder game.” Anyone know? This old MUD-Dev post references the moment when it probably became common currency…