Category: General

General

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Community Engagement

The feeling that I did this myself and it’s good, often beats the feeling that Professionals did this for me and it’s perfect.
— Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

I think we tolerate far more flaws in the MMO genre not just because making massively multiplayer games is especially hard but also because we feel a sense of collaborative development. Players feel like they are contributing something to the game in a way that is not possible in “one and done” games. There is iterative development. There are forums with developers there. There is player-created content. The community participates in testing. It is our game, not their game.

On the other hand, the vast majority of the playerbase is not engaged in the forums, and the biggest game in the Western market has the smallest player input relative to “Professionals did this for me.”

[Update: Alternately, someone has probably worked out the mathematically optimal build for your class. How often do you work through the options on your own, even knowing the math has already been done? How often do you see that theory-crafted build and tweak it, making it your own even though it is most likely slightly worse than the guide-perfect build?]

: Zubon

The Opposite of Grind

Timeless MMO topics are worming their way, yet again, around the ‘sphere. Oh, I can definitely take part of the blame since I strongly dislike subscription games, and what I feel they entail. Clearly, I am neither alone, nor am I objectively correct. Julian, KTR lurker in the threshold, threw down an excellent comment, which in part reads:

The question is why are we seemingly unable to, after 10+ years of designing these things, to avoid the grind? It is generally accepted as un-fun. It’s been a major player complaint since forever. Why are we still operating under the design assumption that grind is somehow “needed” or “part of the flavor of the genre”? Why are we unable to come up with something better?

Which made me think, okay, grind equates to gameplay, but we hate it (mostly). So, what else is there?

“Content,” is what one of my little resident voices said. If defined in such a way, content is the opposite of grind. (Random Google’d website Wordhippo tells me the opposite of “grind” is “joy.”) Yet, from another standpoint grind is content. Our blog would have a completely different name if that weren’t the case.

Continue reading The Opposite of Grind

Love Over Gold

My first bit from Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus is one of the hardest to quote without going to great length. He cites Edward Deci’s experiment with a puzzle game called Soma. Subjects were shown the Soma puzzle pieces along with how they could be reconfigured to make new shapes, given some sample shapes to make, and then given a break.

During his absence from the room Deci observed the subject through a one-way mirror for exactly eight minutes. The subject’s behavior during that break was the experiment. … Even with [a variety of distractions] readily available, many of the students kept playing with the puzzle on their own, spending on average about half of the eight minutes working on it.

[Deci had the students back for a second session. Half]…were told that they would be paid a dollar for every shape they assembled [$5 today, after inflation]. … The paid subjects, who now thought of the cubes as a potential source of income, experimented with them, on average, for a minute more of their break time than they had previously. Deci then ran a third session, where he simply repeated the experiment exactly as he had run it initially: all the subjects were asked to assemble shapes, with no pay for anyone. In this session, even though each subject received identical instructions, the ones who had been paid in the previous session showed markedly less interest in the shapes during the break than in the session where they had been paid; their average time spent dropped by two minutes, which is to say it fell twice as far, when the payment was removed, as it had risen when the payment was added in the first place.

Continue reading Love Over Gold

Poker Night at the Inventory

This is a fair enough review that I do not feel the need to comment further.

Poker Night at The Inventory is basically a game which simulates playing poker with people you don’t like (if you do like them then the game will change that) and who aren’t very good at cards. … the AI is as erratic and foolish as you’d expect 3/4s of the characters to be…a fact proven every time you see one of them go ‘all in’ on a pair of twos or fluking hands on the river.

Valve has a brilliant little promotion going right now, kind of like the Kongregate badges I often mention when I try the game of the week, except they are selling the games. At a few bucks (plus some TF2 items), Poker Night at the Inventory seemed like a small risk. It’s just not a very good game, and I imagine it is worse if you like poker more than I do.

: Zubon

Cognitive Surplus (intro)

I read Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky this weekend. My next series of posts will be quotes from it, with or without the need for additional commentary.

This speech became the first chapter to the book. It serves as a summary for the whole thing, so if you read nothing else I post from the book, it is worth spending 15 minutes listening to it. (You can watch if hand gestures help you understand speeches, but the content is almost entirely verbal.) Come back if you feel like chatting about details as we go along.

: Zubon

Hat tip from 2008 to the sadly departed Jeff Freeman.

Black Friday Recettear

My apologies for announcing this with only three hours to go, but I had not noticed that the Indie story pack at Steam includes Recettear and 4 other games for $5. I said I would buy it for $10, so this is a great deal.

Update: that day’s done, but it looks like the deal is still available. The new $5 indie pack of the day includes World of Goo. Torchlight is $5, if you missed that with last year’s sales. The gift packs are a fun notion, but not one I have occasion to really use: a bulk discount on buying copies of a game to give your friends.

: Zubon

Comment Spotlight

Crud, there’s a bug? Better go back to WoW.
— moondog548

How can so few words contain so many levels of meaning? I had wanted to comment on the usual lack of a middle ground between “dismissive” and “CRISIS!” but I think expectations are the more important point here. Every boss is bugged in a dungeon you visit for the game’s central quest line, more than a year after it went live? Par for the course. Any hope otherwise is risible, worthy of taking the time to publicly mock.

You really do get what you pay for, and you deserve it. If you are willing to pay for things as-is, or as-is plus a hope that they will get better, companies will happily sell them to you. Cryptic has been experimenting with how early in the development cycle you can start selling the game. WoW is what passes for highly polished in our genre; save the real “when it’s ready” for people who demand it.

: Zubon

Haven’t Got a Clue

As I established in my inaugural post, I’m a hobby game design nerd.  So given the opportunity to attend the Buffalo Bills vs. Pittsburgh Steelers game this weekend at Ralph Wilson Stadium, what do I look forward to?  That’s right…how the experience can apply to the browser-based game I’m working on.    Forget that I’ll be in club seating.  Forget that I’ll have a Fanvision on me.  Forget that I’ll probably drink enough beer to forget everything anyway…

I won’t bore you with my analytical break down of how the game of football could apply to the design of an MMO.  Instead, I wanted to talk about the design of my favorite game and get some feedback on yours…

Continue reading Haven’t Got a Clue

What Exactly is a Makkaio Anyway?

Would you believe the internet moniker I’ve been using for the last 15 years came off a coffee mug?  I was in a gift shop in Honolulu, Hawaii, looking at a rack of mugs that had English names on one side and the Hawaiian translation on the other.  Matthew translates into Makaio.  Some dude was already using that name on AOL…so I very creatively added the second ‘K’ and BAM!

First… Continue reading What Exactly is a Makkaio Anyway?

Quick Game

I have complained about perverse randomization frequently this year, and I am sure it will come up as I continue to play a few rounds of Elements per day, but I just heard a winner from NetHack, the archetypal roguelike. Random roll: a monster started with line of sight to the character’s starting point. Random roll: the monster had a wand. Random roll: it was a wand of death. I presume that your odds of dying before your first action (in a perma-death game) are very low.

: Zubon