Kill Ten Rats

MMOs have become more and more focused on solo players and there are many reasons for this. Many people are out there, like me, that just don’t have the time to find a group or else they are worried about having to leave in the middle of something and making the group angry. I claim this is a game design flaw and instead of designing in heavy solo content, games should be focusing on ways to take advantage of the fact that a large number of people are playing the same game at the same time.

Lets take a look at groups in general. Currently many people shy away from “pick up groups” because either they end up with someone that doesn’t know how to play very well and thus harming the group’s advancement or else they are worried something in real life will force them to have to leave too soon. Therefore, they end up playing solo. If a game was to focus instead on making grouping up fun no matter the group make up, and make it easy for people to come and go easily, it would change the interest levels of the players towards grouping in general.

Continue reading Where Did The Social Go?

Sure it’s a working title code name, but it what does it imply?

His new focus, post-pitching, will be to oversee the development of a still-unnamed and shrouded-in-mystery massively multiplayer role-playing game (MMORPG) that goes by the working title Copernicus.

More fun:

…the game is based on a new IP that he says will include deliberate and strategically planned brand extensions into film, TV, books, comics, and action figure iterations.

Oh nevermind, Inhibitor already figured it all out.

– Ethic

This will be my last Gödel, Escher, Bach reference for a while, I promise. This echoes gound that (I think) Raph covered in his Theory of Fun.

This is, it seems to me, a general principle: you get bored with something not when you have exhausted its repertoire of behavior, but when you have mapped out the limits of the space that contains its behavior.

I have cited this previously as sphexishness and piercing the veil. You don’t need to beat the game if you can see how to beat the game. At that point, it is just a series of motions. All mental activity is done, although you might enjoy the physical act of mastering the motions (more so in meatspace than “hitting the buttons in the right order”).

In MMOs, we have the grind: repeat x 5000 times to level. Many single-player games having something to be brute forced, such as perfecting the timing on a dozen jumps in a row (missing one means starting over, maybe a long run away) or randomly mixing together three potions to see what the combinations do. You might as well look up what the right combination is, because there is neither fun nor virtue in trying every combination until you get the right one.

We MMO players are probably too tied to our games. Can there really be enough content in a game to entertain you for years, not months? It is an unreasonable expectation, and we should not leave to bitterly once we have seen what all the game can do for us. The only reason you were sticking around in the end was for the people you played with or against. It is fitting that Mr. Hofstadter continues: “The behavior space of a person is just about complex enough that it can continually surprise other people…”

: Zubon

I had written a rather lengthy rant about the state of the industry and all of the things that just drive me to insanity, particularly design problems, mishandled operations, stupid funding deals, etc. etc. etc. After I wrote it and had some time to sleep on it, I decided that 2008 is a new year, and thus full of promise and potential. I’d rather set the tone with some optimism and deal with the scurvy side of the industry later in the year…

Continue reading Looking forward to 2008

I do not drink much soda, abstaining for weeks at a time last year. For the extended weekend’s New Year’s LAN party, we binged. My body was not prepared to deal with that much caffeine and carbonation. My wife, a devoted consumer of Diet Pepsi, was pretty wired after drinking half a case of Mountain Dew.

We are both still kind of ill from the experience. My thought had been that I am getting too old for living off Mountain Dew and fast food for days at a time, but I realized that I never did that. This makes me feel even older, because apparently I was never young. I went directly from 15 to 45, and I have stayed there.

Taco Bell’s spicy chicken burritos are tasty. Mozzarella sticks are just deep-fried cheese with breading; see the earlier comment about not living off biohazards. Despite that, cheeseburger fries sound tastier than they should.

Mello Yello is still out there, but Coca-Cola seems to have realized that “mellow” is not a competing force with Mountain Dew. This weekend was my first exposure to Vault, labeling itself an energy drink/soda hybrid. Wow, that tastes awful. If you drown the “citrus” flavored drink in orange juice, it does not taste bad, but you might as well mix the orange juice with peach schnapps. Wait, I don’t drink. I have all these wild oats, completely unsown.

: Zubon

The energy drink link is a video, maybe a little NSFW.

Happy New Year folks!

I’m working on a huge post that I will try to get up this weekend or mid-week next week. Mostly, I’m going to give my two cents on the state of the industry (mostly MMO) and explain why I’m so damned bitter and cranky about it. The problems are legion, but there is light at the end of the tunnel.

In retrospect, 2007 was a pretty crappy year on a number of levels, but I think we are nearing the end of the downcycle. Expect some more horrific bombs, failures, and wtf? deals and press releases. However, keep in mind that this is still a relatively young industry with incredible amounts of hope, promise, and potential. I’m not seeing anything that really gets me excited /now/ but the winds are changing. I’ll talk about that more in my post.

In the meantime, hop on over here and leave some comments.