Category: General

Probably one of the most used and abused phrases of 2007, that one.

At its best it’s honest advice, and the words chosen by the voice of experience. At its worst, a political statement and dishonest noise. There’s a little world behind this seemingly harmless phrase, and quite a colorful one too. Is this just the latest weapon of choice in the old and tiresome ‘Casual vs. Hardcore’ debate(*)? Or is there something more behind it and its shining rise to forum stardom?

You will read on. You know you want to.

(*) To call the ‘Casual vs. Hardcore’ debacle a ‘debate’ is like saying the guys in charge of the fryer at Micky Dee’s are ‘Chefs’, but you know where I’m coming from.

Continue reading Don’t tell me to smell the roses

Tim Harford’s comments on a bank run in the UK reminds me that we have an extensive body of research that we can apply to gaming. Appropriately, this is game theory. You have probably noticed that most game developers keep trying to rediscover the wheel when dozens of companies have already made all the relevant mistakes. When Jessica Mulligan stopped writing Biting the Hand, she commented along those lines: no one was making new mistakes, just the same ones over and over again.

Mr. Harford’s example is about group versus solo play. Yes, at British banks. Everyone would prefer to be in a good group, but a bad group is worse than solo play. Yes, there is a large body of academic work that revolves around that one sentence.

MMOs are a more tenuous game than the standard stag hunt. Game theory is usually stated in terms of two players; MMO groups have five or more in a group, and let’s not get to raids. In MMO groups, one weak player may not spoil the hunt but a couple will, and one severe idiot will leave you further from the level cap than where you started. Is it any wonder that so many of us are hunting rabbits?

Do we need an extended treatment of this concept? We could delve into economic theory of the firm and how it applies to guilds.

: Zubon

Only on-topic by name, my undergrad had good news earlier this month and better news this week. That is about $200,000 of good news per student. Kupo!

I forgot to mention that today is Petrov Day. This is when we honor Stanislav Petrov for preventing nuclear war by recognizing that computer errors are more likely than underwhelming missile strikes. His tale is recounted across the internet; I saw it in a variety of places. He is one of the few people who can compete with Norman Borlaug for the claim of having saved a billion lives.

If your MMO in development has a chance of causing a nuclear holocaust, please do more beta testing.

: Zubon

Men are from Earth, women are from Earth: deal with it. If no one understands you or you have trouble talking to girls, the problem is probably you rather than them. You must learn to communicate with the rest of the species.

Harsh? This is a primary point: men and women tend to communicate in different ways. Come explore the implications of this and other issues with IRL’s lousy chat system in our continuing series of articles on dating for the introverted heterosexual male.

Continue reading Dating for Gamers Part 4: Chat Systems

See that Great Person? Do you know who that is? That’s right. If you are falling behind in culture, call a librarian.

: Zubon

I may be deeply screwed up. I often do not enjoy point-and-click puzzle games (oh, I have to click the fish before I flip the switch that turns the cheese into a cat-deflector, of course!), but this one was far more intuitive and logical to me than most.

: Zubon

Hat tip: Play This Thing! (as mentioned yesterday. Check it out for more games)

I have mentioned Virtual Villagers a few times lately. The creators also make Plant Tycoon,® “a gardening sim game where you nurture plants and experiment with increasingly rare and valuable species. The object is to breed and cross breed plants until you find the 6 Magic Plants and solve the genetic puzzle.” They also have a virtual fish-breeding game along the same lines.

Of course, these are offline games. If you are looking for online massively multiplayer breeding, you might try Virtual Horse Ranch. (It says right at the top that this is a “strategic” MMO horse sim game.) Google led me to a surprisingly large number of online virtual horse breeding games.

And people say there is no innovation going on.

: Zubon

Seriously, wouldn’t robust animal/plant/whatever breeding be a neat addition to your game’s trade skills? Don’t just give us a “breeding” skill that increments up: throw in some real Mendelian genetics. A Tale in the Desert has some things along these lines.

Metaplace launches today. The overview over at Crunchbase says:

“Areae’s Metaplace platform wants to revolutionize the virtual worlds space. Their platform will provide an open, easy-to-use interface which will allow users to create virtual worlds that can run anywhere. Metaplace-created virtual worlds will be robust with users being able to play games, socialize, create content and conduct commerce.

Most virtual worlds are walled gardens making it hard to get data in and out of the worlds. Metaplace-created virtual worlds can be embedded into your Facebook page, MySpace page, or your own blog via a flash-based client widget. Every world is indexed, tagged and rated by users on the Metaplace portal, so virtual worlds in the Metaplace network can be easily linked together.”

I have mixed feelings on this, so I am going to wait to comment until I can get a good look and see what is really here.

There is a lot of potential, considering that Koster is at the lead and calling the shots. I am also a firm believer that the precursor to the “metaverse” (or cyberspace depending on your preference) are MMORPGs. I’ve also said that MMORPGs lack a lot of things and so do virtual worlds (like second life). Will Metaplace be a step in the right direction for a change, or will it miss the boat and eventually fall to the side and struggle for years like badly designed MMORPGs and poorly implemented virtual worlds?

I’m hoping that Koster did it right and it takes off. There is a lot of attention on web 2.0 approaches, as well as pseudo-MMOs like club penguin, laguna beach, etc. Expect to see a lot more of these as the “flavor of the day” with the venture crowd becomes social + virtual world. I predict this is a fad, and the people that look to the long term will be thinking way beyond these shallow experiences.

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. More later.

Robert / Nicodemus

I saw the site for Aion today. Guys, no offense, do that one over.

Presenting a major part of your game as “PvPvE” comes across as meaningless crap. It’s not just PvP or PvE — it’s PvPvE! And I saw a video, they can say that with a straight face. The intent is to have a three faction system, which is of course a huge innovation, but one of them is NPC-controlled. Mmhmm. Having the NPCs pick on the winning team is an interesting idea; calling it revolutionary PvPvE means we must discount anything else you say.

If you check that page linked above, you may see my immediate worry in the first sentence. You are leading with “most visually stunning”? You really want the #1 thing people say about your game to be, “It looks pretty”? There are five sections: an overview that says how pretty it is, three tabs of graphics, and “specs: TBD”; you might say something about the game. I suppose we can really test the theory that graphics sell games, but we already have several MMOs with system-cracking graphics. I am also excited about this “true fantasy world,” as I have been playing in fake fantasy worlds this whole time.

You still have time before release. Throw the whole page away and start over, remembering that only gamers are going to bother to visit the site. Or maybe it is targeted to a gaming press that will run with pretty pictures and unsubstantiated claims of revolutionary play… I’m sorry, a massive wave of cynicism has caught me, and I cannot finish.

: Zubon

I do like the idea of focusing on flight to make it real 3-D combat.