vw design

  • Do auction houses suck?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 62 Comments

    Once upon a time, there was a game set in a science fiction universe where the economy was very important. Its name was not Eve.

    In this game, players could, if they so chose, run a business. They could

    • designate a building as a shop
    • hire an NPC bot to stand in it
    • give the bot items to hold for sale
    • specify the prices at which those items would sell
    • customize the bot in a variety of ways
    • make use of advertising facilities to market the shop
    • decorate the shop any way they pleased

    With this basic facility, emergent gameplay tied to the way that the crafting system worked resulted in players who chose to run shops being able to do things Ike build supply chains, manage regular inventory, develop regular customer bases, build marketing campaigns, and in general, play a lemonade stand writ large.

    The upshot was that at peak, fully half the players in Star Wars Galaxies ran a shop.
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  • Is immersion a core game virtue?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 61 Comments

    “I feel a sense of loss over mystery… I feel a loss over immersion. I loved… playing long, intricate, complex, narrative-driven games, and I’ve drifted away from playing them, and the whole market has drifted away from playing them too,” Koster says. “I think the trend lines are away from that kind of thing.”

    — Gamasutra interview of me by Leigh Alexander

    Karateka
    Karateka

    Games didn’t start out immersive. Nobody was getting sucked into the world of Mancala or the intricate world building of Go. Oh, people could be mesmerized, certainly, or in a state of flow whilst playing. But they were not immersed in the sense of being transported to another world. For that we had books.

    Even most video games were not like worlds I was transported to. Oh, I wondered what else existed in the world of Joust and felt the paranoia in Berzerk, but I never felt like I was visiting.

    Then something changed. For me it started with text adventures and with early Ultimas. I could explore what felt like a real place. I could interact with it. I could affect it. And with that came the first times where I felt like I was visiting another world. It came when I first played Jordan Mechner’s Karateka and for the first time ever, felt I was playing a game that felt like a movie.
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  • Notes on game feedback

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 18 Comments

    I was mentioned in a comment on Google+, and ended up writing a little bit about game feedback as a result. So here it is.

    The discussion was on the absence of combat logs (scrolling text windows showing you exact numbers for combat actions) in the new SWTOR MMO. Some folks regret the absence, because they use the logs to optimize what they are doing, and use it as a learning tool. Other players find them a legacy of the text mud days, or a feature that hastens the deconstruction of the entire system and therefore damages the fun factor.

    Both sides are right, really. Combat logs are just a form of feedback. The more feedback the system gives you, the more information you have for the process of figuring out how the system works. This then makes the process of optimizing play easier (read that as “getting the results you want from a given input”).

    The first thing to realize here is that everything the game shows you, really, is a form of feedback. The locations of chess pieces on a board, the “game state,” is a type of feedback. Numbers floating off the enemy are feedback; the glowy effect trailing a swinging sword is also feedback.

    Some forms of feedback are better suited for certain types of information than others.

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  • Gangs and Guilds in MMOs, again

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 2 Comments

    A long while ago I posted about some research that showed that gangs and guilds seemed to have mathematical characteristics in common.  A few days ago, I got this sent to me by someone at the department of CS and Engineering at the University of Minnesota:

    Hi,

    I saw a previous post on your blog about similarities between MMOs and street gangs. Me and my research group (VWO) recently published a paper which contradicts the previous results. We thought you may find it of interest.

    Thanks, Muhammad

    The blog post about the paper can be found here, with some conclusions, and you can also read the pre-print PDF of the paper. It looks like this is based on the the same set of Everquest II data that many researchers have been using for a while now — I am unsurprised to see Dmitri Williams credited.

  • New Bartle video interview

    Hours Categories Game talk

    Got this in the mailbox:

    Hello Mr. Koster,

    I’m a big fan of your work and reader of your blog. You probably don’t remember me but I briefly met you at GDC Online last year. I was looking for Dr. Richard Bartle, who I did find and conducted an interview with.

    A few months ago I released the interview on my Youtube Partner account but forgot to mention to you that I had done so. I thought you might be interested in it.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGg4dx0DlFI

    It’s divided into multiple parts because it was so long and I felt this would be a good way for people to keep track of each segment. Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoy!

    I should be at GDC 2011 so perhaps I’ll see you there?

    Carey

    Interested indeed, and I am sure that others may be as well, so I’ve embedded them below the fold:

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