No mate, coconut and anti-coconut particles emit a photon when they come in contact. A neutron is what you get from coconut undergoing alpha-decay… ;)

But seriously, nice article. Any engineer will tell you that any non-trivial system is (1) made up of many parts (2) behaves in un-expected ways due to interaction of said parts. It takes ingenuity, massive resources and even a little luck to get such a complex system working correctly. Well those and a realy good QA department.

But I have a feeling you’re talking less about bugs and more about the game being enjoyable/fun/polished/whatever over-all. The problem is, no one knows what makes a *good* (well integrated, fun) game, or at least no one is admitting to knowing, including Blizzard ;)

I don’t think WoW is the be-all-end-all of games, even if they did get many of the components right. And I’m saying that as someone who has been playing it for the last 2.5 years. I’m not a developer, but as an educated player, here are my top “good game” components:
1. KISS
If you don’t keep-it-simple, your players will give up (or not even begin), especially those new to games. Simple intro, simple controls, simple progression (quests that guide you, etc.).
2. Low system requirements
So many games require a top-of-the-line system to play them. Guess how many people are *not* willing to spend huge amounts of money on their computer (or don’t have said money).
3. Interface mods
The ability to change the game interface to look and behave the way *you* want? Awesome! I would have given up on WoW loooong before had I been stuck with using Blizzard’s idea of a good interface. I don’t remember any other game before WoW that let me do that, at least not as easily and not so drastically.
4. Content+Graphics
Duh :)

That’s pretty much it. Keep It Simple. Let Them Play It. Let Them Change It. Give Em Content and Make It Look Pretty.
Everything else is just details and QA.
Especially QA.

I just wish Blizzard has chosen Perl or Tcl as the embedded scripting language instead of Lua. Hint, hint… :D

In almost all cases, they eat the big red chemically perfected one, despite the little misshapen strawberries tasting significantly better.

The big red ones are quantity, the little delicious ones are quality. So which do you make and sell?

I got that from Paul Barnett, and he’s right (in part because that was an actual observation, but a great parallel to just about anything in our culture, including video games).

And, you forgot to make your cake and eat it too. After you make it, you have to eat it, then make a new one, and eat it again, and make another, then eat that, then let others try it, then remake it, then others still, and remake it.

It is difficult to really communicate all a designer has to do–it’s not just coming up with nifty ideas and watching someone else implement them.

And, honestly, I still have respect for designers who make that cookie-cutter stuff because that’s not generally what they WANT to make, it’s more often what they HAVE to make. When you realize that the conceptualization, implementation, and refining process for one large quest can take a solid two weeks, you begin to realize why things end up being distilled down so much.

That said, as both a player and designer, I’d rather see a few really high quality parts than just a bunch of okay parts. That whole quality over quantity thing that is overused and underdone. The real question is, do players actually want it (I think so, but there’d be just as many, if not more, complaints about “not enough to do” as there are about “this stuff isn’t compelling” now)?