I’ve been reading Rainbow’s End by Vernor Vinge (recommended by Tipa) and find how gaming is treated there fascinating. Not the contact lenses that let you see different realities, but rather the idea that 1. everyone is a gamer, games are part of everyday life, and many tasks such as research projects are turned into games so much that people don’t even call them games 2. people form “affiliations” to accomplish tasks and these can involve money flowing throughout the affiliation 3. microtransactions everywhere and it’s easy to set them up for your own content 4. everyone is a content creator and many tools are easily available, and frameworks abound to play in 5. multiple frameworks and reference points to create any reality you want, and along with that multiple realities 6. there are more structured games and realities too such as semi-virtual amusement parks, but they also abide by the above 7. it’s “hardcore” though, what’s bad when it gets to that point is there’s no escape it’s life. One of the protagonists is a kid who feels like a loser in real life, and also in games.

anyway … I’m not sure that had anything to do with the post. I thought it did.

He started getting pretty annoyed and frustrated with the web portability and database/PHP integration around the times of MX and eventually gave up on Flash altogether. I wonder of CS3 will allow Flash to be functional on the web aside from mini animations and games again. If so, he may give it another try, but to me at least, Flash is a thing of the past. Ruby on Rails and Ajax is where it’s at IMO.

on topic: I’m looking forward (but not overly hopeful for) to a new genre of gaming, something beyond the MMO(rpg), the FPS, the RTS or the action/platformer fields. it’s getting harder to find it, but i’m of the opinion that someplace there is virgin gameplay territory and i hope someone finds some of it soon.

i also have (almost certainly futile) hopes that pc game designers will stop designing games with the cutting edge PCs housing bleeding egde video cards in mind as the “average” platform of their products. my processor/mobo is 4 years old now, but my video card is only about a year and a half old and my motherboard ram is maxed out at 2 gigs.. CoX runs well until i’ve got 50k+ particles, a party of 8 PC and a mob of 10~15 enemies on screen on medium-high visuals, and Half-Life 2 can chop a bit on medium settings in high traffic scenes.. but Overlord is unplayable even at rock bottom settings, Bioshock frequently sees under 5 frames a second at minimal settings and i don’t even want to think about the next wave of FPS game engines. that’s getting a bit out of hand when i look at the low entry costs and long lifecycles of my console games. if blizzard, NCsoft and gang really want to up their market share, they’d do well to get WoW, CoX, Guild Wars, etc, etc dropped onto the ps3 and 360.

and lastly, i’d like to see a certain change in the mindset
behind “micro-transaction” games.. since one of my main problems with these games is the retention of “it’s data on our servers, so you don’t really own it and if you try to sell it for real cash, we’ll take it all, then ban and/or sue you” mindsets from non-”pay by item” games.. WOTC has been very good about that with Magic online, allowing modo card resellers to follow the real world secondary card market almost exactly in form and function, and most of the korean-developed MMOs with digital items should take a cue from that. if you charge me $25 for a digital cape or helmet or what-have-you, which i then outlevel, replace, or stop needing because i quit playing your game, then i feel i should have every right on earth to throw it on ebay and get some of my investment back (probably not all of it, and unless the game maker stopped selling new instances of the item, certainly not any profit), in the same way i could sell a used dvd or game. but that full rant is for a different subject entirely.

:)

Just because something is good, doesnt mean it is fun…

I’m hoping 2008 brings more micro-transaction gaming ( big surprise there eh? ), that the free-to-play pay-for-stuff model will finally crack the North American market in something other than online socializing sites and Magic the Gathering.

I am also deeply hoping that the North American obsession with ‘Innovation’ will finally fade away and die the death it so needs to die, and that we can all get back to the basics of building fun games. I’m pretty sure ‘Innovation’ is killing the games industry, or at least the over emphasis on being something ‘new’ rather than being something ‘good’.

And, staring into my crystal ball, I see me continuing to play NES games with my favourite Mac ROM emulators, and staying 8-bit in a 128-bit world.

:)