Terra Nova: MMOG eSport? asks the question of whether MMOGs are amenable to eSports.

Are they good as spectator sport? Would something have to be tweaked in the genre (and in the whole field of play around it) to make them so. And even then, would it be an interesting or good idea?

It’s sort of an odd question to ask, in some ways, given the history of the genre. Arguably, the games started out with a heavy degree of sport built in. The early games that were full-reset or “Groundhog Day” MUDs had a degree of inspiration from games such as Zork. The core mechanic of an early AberMUD, for example, involved gathering items from around the game and bringing them back to a pool where they were dumped; you earned XP for doing so; in the original Zork, you gathered items from around the game and returned them to a trophy case in the small white house.
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Did you know that the Laws of Online World Design have been translated into Russian? Courtesy of Dmitry Nozhnin.

I forgot that the KGC organizers also asked us to answer some interview questions so I’ve added that to the Interviews page.

What do you expect a revolutionary change or a paradigm shift in the global game industry in five years time? Also, what would be a hero or a driving force for that?

I think that we are experiencing that shift in the game industry today. Everyone is hitting the wall of rising costs and technical barriers, and the responses we are seeing are many. Sony and Microsoft are emphasizing online and microtransactions. Nintendo is moving towards new forms of control, to try to break out of the hardcore game market. The Serious Games movement in North America is gathering a lot of steam, with more attention than ever being paid to ways in which games can teach or train. The independent game movement is also a major new trend, moving the industry (finally) onto the Internet for real, embracing digital distribution chains and unique gameplay. Europe has become a hotbed of games scholarship, developing games studies into a true academic discipline. And Korea, of course, continues to demonstrate the cutting edge of a true gaming society, where the legal issues and cultural issues of mainstream gaming are confronted on a daily basis.

More at this link.