vw design

MUD influence

June 27, 2008June 28, 2008 Game talk

As part of the ongoing raking over the coals of Richard Bartle for saying the obvious (yes, you can tell what side I am on in those debates!), Steve Danuser says over at Moorgard.com » Sacred Cows

I get tired of people implying that today’s MMOs owe their entire existence to the MUDs of yesteryear. Sorry, I disagree. The gameplay style of EQ or WoW is obviously influenced by MUDs, but I propose that MMOs would have evolved anyway.

And Ryan Shwayder posts in comments saying

Ultima Online is a direct descendant of what MUD? I’m not saying it isn’t, I’m just saying that I don’t know what particular MUD had a profound influence on that game. It seems like the MMO industry was born of different influences; EverQuest from DikiMuds, Ultima Online from Ultima games. Not all MMOs have a lot of direct comparisons to MUDs, so I think he’s right that they’d exist whether MUDs did or not.

Well…

Auto-puppeteering avatars patent

June 9, 2008 Game talk

17 Comments

Massively has an article about a university in Australia patenting a way to extract emotional info from player actions and automatically puppeteer the avatar.

There’s a long history of this sort of thing out there, of course. This particular patent, for example, references pulling out emoticons from chat, as many worlds have done, but also pairing them up with voice analysis in order to better match up emotional markers provided by voice and the tone intended by a given emoticon.

Zon: Chinese language learning MMO

June 4, 2008June 4, 2008 Game talk

4 Comments

This is cool: an MMO devoted to language learning via full immersion.

Welcome to Zon! | Enter Zon

Zon is an unique interactive massively multiplayer online role playing game for learning Mandarin Chinese.

By interacting in the Zon environment you will be exposed to Chinese language and cultural knowledge in a new and exciting way. Everything that you do in the game is another chance to learn new words, phrases and cultural info about China. Never before has learning Chinese been more fun.

Not at all the first time this has been tried, of course; at SOE we supported a few college campuses that were doing full-immersion language learning via EQ2, for example.

Interdependent systems

April 22, 2008 Game talk

49 Comments

Next Generation has an informative email from Russell Williams, the CEO of Flying Lab, giving the reasons why they are having to merge servers. It’s a great insight into the complex equation involved in estimating how many servers to have.

One of the items in particular caught my eye:

Game systems
Pirates’ gameplay is very organic, designed in such a way that the different systems feed into one another. In a PvE-only game, focusing mainly on content, this isn’t a big deal. But in Pirates of the Burning Sea we have systems that require a minimum number of players to function correctly, such as our economy, and they break other systems if they’re not working correctly (such as PvP). If we didn’t have these kinds of interdependent systems, we wouldn’t even be considering server merges.

How to hack an MMO

April 17, 2008April 19, 2008 Game talk

49 Comments

Given the recent hack to the blog, and also given the recent news of the decompiled Eve Online client, it seemed like a good time to go over some of the ways in which a virtual world gets hacked.

The interesting thing, of course, is that all the hacks I am going to talk about are actually not hacking the virtual world at all; they instead attack the client, which is your window into the world, and also your waldo, your means of exercising control over what happens in that world. And that’s because…

The client is in the hands of the enemy.

— The Laws of Online World Design

You’ve probably heard that before — I wasn’t the first one to say it, but it constantly gets misattributed to me. That particular phrasing may have originated with Kelton Flinn, but I am sure many of us came up with it independently.