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  • GDCOnline: UO Classic Game Postmortem

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 8 Comments

    Well, we basically winged it, but it was a blast. We told stories, mostly out of order; fessed up to bad code and goofy decisions and being painfully young; and lamented the loss of that sens of crazy freedom.

    Luckily, Gamasutra has you covered if you weren’t in the full house.

    In the alpha, the team had wolves that chased rabbits across the map as part of its emergent gameplay system.

    In those early days, the rabbits would actually level up if they got into a fight with a wolf and managed to escape.

    “People would wander off in the alpha and try to kill a rabbit, and pretty soon they were playing Monty Python: The MMO,” joked Koster.

    The game was tweaked to disallow this, though Koster confesses that they left one monster rabbit in the world when the final game shipped.

    I wore my original UO shirt… and forgot to point it out! Doh!

    Basically, during the period when we were skunkworks and ignored by the company (it was mutual, we ignored them back) we did our own marketing. So that meant we made our own t-shirts with a made-up logo. And I still have that shirt, in surprisingly good shape for being from 1996. All credit to Clay Hoffman for making it, way back when…

     

     

  • GDCOnline: Online Game Legend

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 8 Comments

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    Last night i was given the Online Game Legend Award at the GDC Choice Online awards show. Rich Vogel gave a touching introduction. I think he was more nervous than I was!

    This is a reasonable facsimile of the little acceptance speech I gave. The real thing was filmed and is up on twitch.tv or Gamespot somewhere… edit: Oh, here: http://www.twitch.tv/gamespot/b/335135808

    I don’t feel like I deserve this, but i am happy to pretend that I do!

    I want to thank all of those people whose credit I am taking, many of whom are here tonight. You know who you are. It’s 16 years worth of names and I can’t possibly say them all.

    I do want to say some things that I have learned.

    First, don’t make my mistakes. I’ve made many. You’ve played them. Make new ones.

    Listen and learn, especially from your players.

    Share it all back.

    Don’t settle. Dare, instead.

    Love what you do.

    But a hard-won lesson here: Love your family more. Spend time with them too.

    My mom asked me to say this: soy Latino. Most people don’t seem to know… So it can be done.

    In theory I have more career years ahead of me than behind. I guess I’m going to have to come up with something new!

    Thank you.

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  • GDCOnline: A Theory of Fun, 10 Years Later

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 32 Comments

    Here are the slides for the design track keynote I gave yesterday.

    And here they are as a PDF. Edit: thanks to Alexandre Houdent for providing a version of the PDF that works on all OSes…

    Among the topics: a recap of Theory of Fun, discussion of what I would change about it today, and all the thoughts it led me to: game grammar, games as art, games as math, the ethics of games, gamification, etc. With a dash of Classical philosophy.

    I had the shakes bad before I started… but it felt like it came together in the end.

    Apologies to anyone whose face I rendered unrecognizable. And the unlabelled woman is Jane McGonigal.

    The press coverage so far:

    A challenge for you all: can you name all these people without peeking at the slides? Read More “GDCOnline: A Theory of Fun, 10 Years Later”

  • OGDA meeting

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 6 Comments

    On Saturday I met with the Omaha Game Developers Association in a Google Hangout for a couple of hours of interview-style questions. The whole thing was streamed live on YouTube and also captured afterwards, so here it is for those who have the patience.

    Among the things we talked about:

    And way more… vid after the break.

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  • GDCOnline: revisiting A Theory of Fun

    Hours Categories Game talk

    So the third thing I will be doing at GDCOnline has now been announced:

    A Theory of Fun 10 Years Later

    Design | 60-Minute | Track Keynote | All
    TBD

    Ten years ago, at the very first Austin Game Conference, online gaming pioneer Raph Koster delivered an inspiring keynote on why games matter, how they teach players, and what fun is. That talk served as the foundation for his valuable book, A Theory of Fun for Game Design, challenging game makers to build entertaining, engaging, and addictive experiences. Now, for the tenth anniversary of his presentation, Koster will revisit A Theory of Fun to discuss what has changed in the science and the theory in the intervening years.

    Yup, this is actually the tenth anniversary of the original Theory of Fun talk. Hard to believe! I think most did not become aware of it until I reprised it as the keynote of the Serious Games Summit at GDC the next year… And then, of course, the book also followed later that year too.

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