It’s been a very long time since I participated in one of these — but I took the plunge once more, giving one answer to the question of what Far Eastern and Western developers can learn fom each other.
I hadn’t seen this paper by T.L. Taylor until Michael Chui pointed it out — entitled “Beyond Management: Considering Participatory Design and Governance in Player Culture,” it discusses the question of whether and how and when online world design can embrace the notion of true player participation and collaboration in the game design process.
I suspect there are some designers reading this in a state somewhere between strong dismay and abject horror even as we speak.
The press release is here, but basically, pjio.com lets arbitrary people upload games — standalone Windows games, that is — and put them on this portal. A web-browser plugin then lets them be played in the browser. Users can play them for free, tag them, and earn “karma” which lets them unlock game features, etc. They can also just follow the links back to the indie developer and buy the game from them. Lastly, the players can actually find a game they like and embed it in their own website, just like you can with a YouTube clip.
Developers not only get all the profit, but they also get a share of the ad revenue for the site. It looks like there’s an API for doing things like leaderboards and the like, so devs can hook into the larger community features.
This is a step beyond the sort of “portal-as-publisher” model that we have seen digital distribution take on so far, and it is a really exciting one. It originated within the BlitzBasic community, with a company called Indiepath.
There’s a Terra Nova thread titled Source Identification and Soulbinding which basically says,
…soulbinding is a “source identifier.” In WoW-like systems, you know if a person has been through a particular dungeon because the item they’re carrying could only have come from there. I have a Misplaced Server Arm, thus, you know I’ve been in Naxxramas. Fine.
But in DDO (which does have soulbinding, but to a lesser degree), the difficulty is that I can’t read the life story of a potential groupmate in their equipment.
There once was this erstwhile poet
Who swore, “I’ll post Sundays, ya know it!”
But a weekend away
Left no time to stray
So the conference* caused him to blow it.
*Project Horseshoe, that is. Where there were multiple limericks delivered, in fact. Plus that old blue joke about the bagpipe and the octopus who walks into a bar.
