Supernova 2008: “All the World’s A Game” summary

 Posted by (Visited 10657 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Jun 202008
 

(CC) Elliott Ng, UpTake Travel Search.The UpTake Blog has a great summary of the panel I was on. They missed my opening remarks, which were largely inconsequential: a brief overview of fields outside of games that are relevant to virtual world design, which can be summarized as “all of them.”

Elliot Ng’s summary reads:

  1. Raph shared about “emergent” play, like endgame raids in World of Warcraft and Everquest (aka Evercrack) not originally envisioned by the game developers but created by the players.
  2. Raph: “Humans enjoy transgressive play” and will always try to break free from the game constraints.
  3. Doug’s thesis oversimplified is as follows: Gamers will be more successful in the future workplace than non-gamers, because of five key characteristics of the gamer’s disposition: (1) Gamers have a bottom-line mentality, (2) Gamers understand the value of diversity, (3) Gamers thrive on change, (4) Gamers see learning as fun, (5) Gamers tend to marinate on the edge.
  4. Dave said that “it freaks him out” that the Web communities he build have the same, fundamental game mechanics as online games like World of Warcraft. Are we destined to create games that follow that pattern and will we live in a flattened world because of it?
  5. Dave invoked the eerie story of Japanese schoolchildren obsessing over “shiny balls of mud” called dorodango and creating an external evaluative process to allocate status and distinction based on expertise gained through repetitive practice creating these balls of mud. Is this simply the human condition? Do game and Web designers accentuate these hard-wired tendencies? Or do we have freedom to choose the future we want?
  6. Doug: “what i’m concerned is that kids are being trained to be consumers. In Hello Kitty, Barbie Girls, and Club Penguin, citizenship is being a good consumer.”

I was struck by the fact that so much of the discussion, particularly on Dave’s side, echoed concerns from my Project Horseshoe talk “Influences.” There  was much discussion of the social impact of “the grind” as large-scale cultural phenomenon: is it good to indoctrinate kids into a “gamist” mentality?

Image (CC) Elliott Ng, UpTake Travel Search.

Supernova panel Wednesday

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Jun 172008
 

Somehow, I completely spaced mentioning that I am on a panel at Supernova on Wednesday (which may be “now” by the time you read this…!).

All the World’s a Game
Moderator Susan Wu (Charles River Ventures), Doug Thomas (USC), Dave Elfving (Apple), Raph Koster (Metaplace)

Massively multiplayer online games offer glimpses of how social interactions and work will develop in the Network Age. What can they teach us? How can businesses and online communities leverage insights from virtual worlds to develop more effective systems and practices?

Mass market perspective

 Posted by (Visited 8872 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Jun 162008
 

I don’t know if you have seen the McDonald’s Line Rider commercial, but it caught me by surprise while watching some show with my kids (it was old hat to them, of course).

Very cool that a little indie game has made it to a commercial, and it follows on the heels of other game-based commercials like the Coke parody of GTA and the WoW truck commercial. But does Line Rider seem like an odd choice for the ad, given that it hardly has the mass market penetration that something like Grand Theft Auto has? Perhaps we might think that it isn’t something that the average non-gamer is going to have heard about.

I think this perception is upside-down. I think the non-gamer (meaning, core game industry gamer) is more likely to bump into Line Rider than into many of the industry’s mainstream products (GTA and WoW are not fair comparisons, given that they’re at the hyper-top end of popularity and mass market penetration).

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If your architect were a game designer…

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Jun 132008
 

Let’s say you were wealthy and lived in New York City, and hired an arhcitect to redo your new apartment. And you dropped a single, small hint that you liked playfulness — that you wanted a poem you had written for your kids to be embedded in the wall somewhere.

A whole year later, you realized that what the architect gave you was an apartment that was an adventure game, rich and deep with fiction and characters and mysteries…

In any case, the finale involved, in part, removing decorative door knockers from two hallway panels, which fit together to make a crank, which in turn opened hidden panels in a credenza in the dining room, which displayed multiple keys and keyholes, which, when the correct ones were used, yielded drawers containing acrylic letters and a table-size cloth imprinted with the beginnings of a crossword puzzle, the answers to which led to one of the rectangular panels lining the tiny den, which concealed a chamfered magnetic cube, which could be used to open the 24 remaining panels, revealing, in large type, the poem written by Mr. Klinsky.

If there is any justice in the world, this apartment should be preserved as a museum and as a testament to human creativity. 🙂

MMORPG Tycoon

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Jun 102008
 

Ever wanted to run an MMORPG? Well, now you can without having to do the pesky step of actually creating one. 🙂

MMORPG Tycoon is an indie game written for a game contest. You have a procedurally generated MMO, and your job is to keep the forum posters happy.

I’m downloading it now… watch me suck at it.

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