The Complex Universe of Games and Puzzles, Simplified, claims Wired. I think I disagree mightily with many many of the links and clusters (code and math are way more tightly related than that! And I can’t tell why they see Board Games and Games as separate nodes. And…
But it’s a cool visualization, and there are lots of cool gems hidden away. Ah, look, there’s Sprouts, a game I always forget the rules to.
There’s a great postmortem of the Metaplace game jam we did a couple of weeks back at WorldIV.com » Surprisingly, Making Games is Hard Work.
I did jacks — I was planning on doing Pente after that. My thoughts on it:
These were designed a little games that you can click on someone else and invite them to play. The screenshots, by the way, are what jacks looked like about an hour after the jam ended, so I got all the way to “alpha” — playable, reasonably balanced, and with a general visual design in place.
Edit: I don’t actually play EVE, just watch from afar. I’ve corrected some errors below that players of EVE mentioned to me. 🙂
A few days ago, everyone wanted me to write about the massive destruction of the Band of Brothers alliance in EVE Online, and how Goonsquad GoonSwarm finally triumphed via an act of betrayal.
But honestly, another day, another giant EVE scam. Ho hum. Is there anything really good to say about this?
For the uninitiated: there was a huge aliance named Band of Brothers. There was another clan named Goonsquad GoonSwarm who hated them (edit: well, everyone, really) and worked against them, but was not nearly as big or powerful. Goonsquad GoonSwarm would recruit BoB members in order to scam them. A BoB member joined under these false pretenses, but then chose sides and rather than be scammed, asked to join for real — and offered up BoB as his price of entry. He was a high-level admin of BoB, and he basically disbanded the whole thing, destroying it from within, and Goonsquad GoonSwarm made piles of virtual money.
The most intriguing aspect of the whole thing to me isn’t the way it happened, but the overall social dynamics of it — the fact that it was completely inevitable. There’s been lots of talk about how this was basically a sort of exploit, that one person should not have enough power to destroy the work of thousands. But I’ll make the case that this is exactly what CCP should want to have happen.
Chat is never enough.
It should be a truism, but far too many social virtual spaces and even sites have fallen down in this regard.You build a social environment, maybe theme it a little bit, and sit back and expect people to turn it into a vibrant community. But nothing happens. It doesn’t catch fire. It doesn’t ever form the nubbin of a community.
It’s probably a cliche to even bring up pearls. Pearls happen inside oysters and mussels (or at least they used to, before we all got used to artificial ones). They aren’t formed around grains of sand specifically, but rather around irritants of many sorts, usually quite tiny ones. The pearl is a protective mechanism, something that wraps around the irritation. In the wild, this happens very rarely — you have to go through hundreds of oysters to find a pearl, and even then, it might not be much of one. But since the 1920s or so, we have cultured pearls, making them happen on purpose.
In the last long post, I talked about how to make a game world more social. In this post, I want to do the opposite — talk about ways to add the irritant that causes the pearl to form. Social interaction is a pearl of great price, especially in worlds devoted to it; and yet, this pearl does not form easily without prompting. And the prompting often takes the form of an irritant.
I’ve said before that socialization requires downtime, by which I mean that people who are busy pressing a bunch of other buttons or busy watching a dozen different colored bars have pretty much given all their attention to it, and therefore have difficulty having a conversation (or indeed paying attention to anything else, as other people in that person’s house can attest).
This doesn’t mean that you have to force downtime, necessarily. Users can choose to stop doing whatever it is, and choose instead to just hang out. But they often don’t. So why is that, and can we or should we do anything about it?
The short answer is “yes,” and you can just scroll down to the list at the end if you agree and want concrete actionable things you can do to improve the sociability of your game. But if you want to argue, then the next two big blocks of text are for you. 🙂
