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  • But First, the Game

    Hours Categories Game talk, Gamemaking
    Comments 1 Comment

    In the last couple of articles, I might have spent too much time talking about big buzzwords – metaverse this and persistent state technology that. I get it, it can be confusing!

    If I were to start throwing around even more technical stuff – like, how we drive Node.js from our highly-optimized C# server backend to implement a TypeScript-based scripting environment so gameplay code can be reloaded without a build or restart – well, plenty of people’s eyes might glaze over.

    So instead, I want to talk about why our overall tech approach makes for better lives for our developers and better games for our players.

    A fundamental truth

    To make better games, we need to enable developers to iterate faster.

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  • Revealing Playable Worlds technology

    Hours Categories Game talk, Gamemaking
    Comments 8 Comments

    Last week, I talked about “metaverse,” the hype around it, and how much of what people dream about is actually stuff online worlds have done for many years now. I ended the article on a bit of a tease, promising that I would talk about what we are doing.

    I won’t tease this time.

    We have built a metaverse platform.

    Wait, did you say “have built?” Past tense?

    Oh, it’s not done. We’re probably going to be working on this for years. But I say “built” because, well, we have the basics of this stuff working. 

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  • Thinking long-term

    Hours Categories Game talk

    Another week, another post over on the Playable Worlds website. This time it’s about “engagement” and “retention”: those words which can be boogeymen for those concerned about the business practices of game publishers, but which are also crucial to long-term enjoyment of a game.

    The first virtual world I worked on was LegendMUD. It is still running after a quarter-century. My second was Ultima Online. When I go to a UO player gathering, I see three whole generations of families who have played that game for 23 years now: grandparents, parents, and kids. Why?

    Because running a game like this, a world like this, a service like this – this is a long-term emotional relationship with the player.

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  • Designing for Social Play

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 2 Comments

    Oops, I forgot to post about this yesterday when it went up!

    I wrote about designing for social play for the Playable Worlds website. As you can see, I’m doing an article a week for now… that will probably change once we get more folks writing about what we are doing and inch ever closer to an actual reveal of what we are making.

    In the end, good social design is about good society design. That’s what underlies the buzzword, and why it’s so sad that the word “social” gets reduced to mindless clicking or dark patterns on a social media site.

    Diversity of people and of play makes for a more robust society, a more enduring community, in every way. That’s good for us as a business. More importantly, it’s better for players. It makes for an online world that doesn’t chase you out or make you feel insignificant or unwanted. A world where you can pursue your own dream.

    From up close, from where we stand, we cannot see the shape of the whole. My hope is that by playing in a world like this, players come to realize the interconnectedness of all things.

    If the ideas discussed there sound of interest to you, and you are a game dev — you might want to check out our jobs page — we’re hiring for a bunch of roles!

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  • Player-driven economies

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 3 Comments

    I’ve got a new blog post up on the Playable Worlds site, this time talking about the value of economies driven by players, and what that really means.

    This often all gets boiled down to the phrase “a player-driven economy.” And people think it means revenue models and monetization. Maybe, if they are savvier about online worlds, they think it means players make the items that other players play with – and that’s true, they can and do and should! But even that is still a reductionist way to think of it.

    A player-driven economy isn’t about the money. It’s about having every way to play the game serve a role in the ecosystem. It’s about all the wonderful and weird ways we choose to live and play, and how we find out that our silly hobbies are vital necessities to someone else.

    In the end, it’s about making everyone important. Because we all are. Important. Plumbers, baristas, roleplayers and raiders.

    Check it out here!

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