vw design

  • Ways to make your virtual space more social

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 91 Comments

    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. 🙂

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  • Revisiting the Laws

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 4 Comments

    No, not me. Razakius, over at Razakius.com, who is working on what looks like an ongoing project to revisit every Law of Online World Design.

    This does happen every few years — someone decides to do a series revisiting them. I think this is healthy. The last new Law was “Socialization requires downtime,” which was a while ago.

    One of the nicest things about the Laws, I think, is that when you read them they are so clearly high level that so many of the little design cul-de-sacs the Diku genre has fallen into are obviously not applicable. Nobody has asked for “PvP is evil” or “PvP must always be in RvR form” or some such to be put on there, for example.

    On the other hand… never had to remove one yet, either. Not sure whether that is troubling or not!

  • Wired makes the case for more torture in games

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 20 Comments

    If you weren’t sick of this debate already, here’s more.

    So this, really, is the problem with World of Warcraft‘s torture sequence. It does not model any consequences. You torture the sorcerer, but nothing particularly comes of it. You just move on to the next quest.

    This would be lame in a TV show, but is arguably even lamer in a videogame, because it’s not too hard to imagine all sorts of repercussions that would have been dramatically fascinating while actually enhancing the gameplay.

    For example, Lich King maker Blizzard Entertainment could have made the Art of Persuasion quest optional — but endowed it with some unusually lucrative loot or experience. That would have made it a genuine moral quandary: Should you do a superbad thing for a really desirable result?

    — “Why We Need More Torture in Videogames“, Clive Thompson in Wired

  • Worlds.com VW patents to be enforced?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 5 Comments

    Virtual Worlds News is reporting that a law firm has been retained to enforce the Worlds.com patents on 3d virtual worlds. These patents are quite old — filed in the early 90s — and center around visibility culling of avatars in various ways.

    Worlds owns U.S. Patent Nos. 6,219,045 titled “Scalable Virtual World Chat Client-Server System”  and 7,181,690 titled “System and Method for Enabling Users to Interact in a Virtual Space.”

    Together the claims describe systems for tracking the spatial relationships of avatars and objects in client/server systems and managing their interactions as well as how many can be displayed at any given time.

    It will be interesting to watch what comes of this.

  • Why are corpse runs bad?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 34 Comments

    In a recent discussion over at f13, folks are cataloging “design errors” from past MMOs. And one of the ones cited was the notion of a corpse run. For those not familiar with this concept, this is where your character dies, leaves all of their stuff at the corpse, and you have to run back to where the corpse is to pick up your gear.

    I argued that corpse runs shouldn’t belong on this list. It’s like calling the telegraph a design gaffe because phones replaced it. Corpse runs were (mostly) all there was at the time, and under the philosophy of “don’t change what works” would have been everyone’s default choice back then.

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