Worldcon schedule
My Worldcon schedule:
Friday August 25th, 10am: “World of Warcrack” panel, ACC 212-A
Yep, I am moderating a panel about WoW. The other folks on the panel include Mike Stemmle, co-designer of classic LucasArts games like Sam & Max and Escape from Monkey Island; William B. Fawcett, author of The Fleet series of books; Justin Lloyd of Otaku no Zoku, and Scott Campbell, who is apparently a game developer but I can’t quite figure out which Scott Campbell it is. 🙂
The panel description reads,
Massively Multiplayer Online Games have long been popular but none have ever been as popular as World of Warcraft. (At its height, “Everquest” had fewer than one million subscribers; WoW has about six million.) Why are these sorts of games popular and what is it about WoW that makes it king?
Saturday August 26th, 3pm: Autographing session, ACC ATGR6.
The Autographing area is in the exhibits area between art show and dealers room. I’m opposite the likes of Harlan Ellison, and who knows if they will even carry my book at any of the dealers at Worldcon. But if they do, or even if they don’t, bring one, and I’ll draw a penguin in it. I’ll be happy to sign game boxes too, I suppose. I imagine there will be no line, because nobody there will have the slightest clue who I am. 🙂
I will probably get up there on Thursday evening and wander around in a daze at my first-ever Worldcon, and drive back down sometime on Saturday evening.
15 Responses to “Worldcon schedule”
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That is one transcript I would like to see. WoW’s popularity is rather fascinating, but then again…look at certain games in other countries. Lineage and Starcraft have enormous followings. It is inevitable that some “virtual sport-league” (which in my opinion is what WoW is more than anything) would atract the obsessions of the US players.
BTW, speaking of your fame. In case you were wondering how you got famous enough to warrant a wikipedia page about yourself. It was I who was first to add you!
Although the entry was very much below par and read something like:
“Raph Koster is the creative director for SOE and well as the author for…”
Looks like someone came along and made it look much better http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raph_Koster
WOW has definitely been the first popular “average joe’s” online game. Counterstrike and it’s 200,000-a-day players almost reached this holy grail a few years ago, but it’s mod nature kept it just bubbling under the mainstream.
I played WOW for about 6 months this year and loved every minute of it. I considered making a few alts once my main reached level 60, but to be honest I was bored of it. I get the feeling that the majority of WOW’s other 5,999,999 players aren’t hardcore and either haven’t made it to 60 yet, or are happy enough to play with a few alts. The game really goes downhill once 60 is reached; every objective for the player to achieve is simply a matter of making an ungodly strong NPC in order that piling on up to 40 players is the only way to win…hardly rocket science for any developer.
The funny thing is that WOW cetainly has less going for it in terms of unique content than games such as EVE, or the potential that SWG had/promised. It’s popularity, in this humble gamer’s opinion, is mainly based on the multitude of quest to run, and it’s flawless application…never have I played a game for so long and not come across a major bug or flaw!
I really hope that developers take to heart WOW’s strengths, without copying it’s major downfall….a poor endgame. With SWG, it became clear that SOE were going all out for the WOW dollar; even now the game is copying as many WOW elements as it can (this week’s inventory changes for example). A game with SWG’s unique play as it was back in 2003, with the polish, flair and content that WOW had will clean up. I just hope I’m around to see it!
I love the picture in the Wikipedia entry.
<reminiscence>
My favorite quotation from Raph is still — “Get over yourselves; the rest of the world is coming.” But I found it back in 2003ish, when I was still primarily at Skotos, and just starting on MUD-Dev, on Biting the Hand. A little bit of research shows that it was spoken at a 2002 GDC panel.
Clearly, I liked it on its own merit and generalized it widely without actually knowing or caring who Raph was. =P
</reminiscence>
Have fun at WorldCon.
Hey!
🙂
[…] schedule Worldcon schedule: “My Worldconschedule: […]
If you see George R.R. Martin there, please tell him to finish my book.
k thx!
Feast of Crows? Isn’t it out already? It didn’t take him THAT long 😉
Or are you talking about The Ice Dragon? I can’t wrap my head around “George R. R. Martin” and “children’s book” being used in the same sentence.
(correcting myself: A Feast for Crows)
[…] Comments […]
It’s funny that you say that as one of the big, expansion PvP features they’re talking up is a ‘PvP Arena’ where your team is pitted against other teams and ranked on a ladder. I guess Blizzard likes to stick with what they know.
chabuhi – I’m talking about the next one — A Dance With Dragons. Or, part 2 of the one he put out last year. A Friend (Driakos, for those of you who know him) said that he felt like A Feast For Crows was cut short, as if they had ended Star Wars where Han Solo says, “That’s no moon!” Funny, but true.
Forget his new Fantasy stuff – Tell GRRM to bring back Tuf !! 🙂
Tholal wrote:
Blizzard Entertainment knows competitive gaming. Many people mistakenly think, “Blizzard knows RTS games.” They’re not wrong, but they’re usually not thinking that competition is central to real-time strategy games. The people of Blizzard have learned how to develop highly successful interactive and competitive gaming experiences. Don’t expect Blizzard to throw down their guns.
Spore mastermind Will Wright knows how to create fun simulations. Through Maxis, Will has never drifted too far and/or permanently from creating fun simulations. He is also constantly learning, and therefore expanding the realm of what he knows.
“The grass always seems greener on the other side, but it’s not. Build on your experience rather than jumping ship,” wrote Jerry Couvaras, Chief Executive Officer of Atlanta Bread Company, in The Way to the Top: The Best Business Advice I Ever Received compiled by Donald Trump.
It seems downright odd to me when non-WoW developers discuss WoW. It always sounds like wishful “how do we get their numbers?” kind of talks, with little real value to the state of the art.
I’d really like to hear what Blizzard has to say about the MMO business, but it seems like they just don’t talk about, um, anything. Hell, even Smed would come down off his ivory tower once in a while.
Why are MMOG’s popular?
I was just thinking that this morning. Actually asking myself why I keep playing them vs. playing stand alone games. When I saw this thread I decided to think about it some more. I came to a conclusion that for me it’s what I’ll call social noise.
First let me say that I’ve been in guilds before,been part of social groups online starting back with UO. Lately I find myself playing alone but occasionally, rarely actually, grouping up with others. This is what got me to thinking why do I, a rather solo player keep playing these MMOGs? And I came to the conclusion it is because I can affect others and others can affect me even if very insignicantly. This is what I call social noise.
I think it happens a lot and I just never realized it or gave it too much thought. An example would be if I’m watching a comedy. It’s more fun to watch with other people, hear them laugh, see or feel them respond to your laughter, than it is to watch alone.
UO is a great example. For the last year I played I could have pretty much done everything I did on an emulator. But the social noise would have been missing. Selling one thing off a vendor is social noise. Dropping things and having other pick them up or even ignore them is social noise. You see even if your dropped an item and people passed it by, you know that they saw it, thought about it and decided to do nothing. This added to your and their social noise.
I’m probably stating the obvious, but it wasn’t obvious to me this morning, now it is.
Peace.