AGDC is coming up, and here’s my speaking schedule:

Designing for Everywhere

• Raph Koster

 Wednesday, 11:00am — 12:00pm Online Games – Design/
60-minute Lecture

In the last few years, big strides have been made towards understanding how games work, in a bones-and-blood sort of sense. We now understand much more than we did about the interactions between mechanics, the pacing of goal structures, and the way in which aesthetics and “dressing” work with the game structures. This can lead towards new ways to create games, ways that work better with our increasingly wired world. The rising wave involves user participation and creation, multiplatform, always connected entertainment, and rapid development. In this lecture, we’ll explore design and technology approaches that push towards the goal of “play anywhere” using these criteria as design principles.

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• Technollama has a take on the panel on regulation.
• Metaversum has three days of notes: day one, day two, day three

15 Things You Should Know About vSide, The New 3D Facebook

It’s interesting to see the shifts in perspective happening. Right when many folks are discussing how to integrate more user created content into virtual worlds, we see being a closed environment praised because it makes for a more coherent experience. 🙂 And 11 hours /played and 78 minute average sessions are praised, when it’s tiny compared to most gaming worlds… but it IS huge compared to casual games. I wonder what the stats on that are for SNSes…