Revisiting the Laws
(Visited 6859 times)No, not me. Razakius, over at Razakius.com, who is working on what looks like an ongoing project to revisit every Law of Online World Design.
This does happen every few years — someone decides to do a series revisiting them. I think this is healthy. The last new Law was “Socialization requires downtime,” which was a while ago.
One of the nicest things about the Laws, I think, is that when you read them they are so clearly high level that so many of the little design cul-de-sacs the Diku genre has fallen into are obviously not applicable. Nobody has asked for “PvP is evil” or “PvP must always be in RvR form” or some such to be put on there, for example.
On the other hand… never had to remove one yet, either. Not sure whether that is troubling or not!
4 Responses to “Revisiting the Laws”
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Every year or so I have a conversation with someone, or a topic of discussion comes up somewhere, that prompts me to track down the Laws again. They are impressively timeless. A good friend of mine contributed one of them as well, and I always enjoy seeing his name there. His law is:
I’ve never thought to do an actual analysis/critique/rewrite of them. That’s not a bad idea…
That’s old and embarrassing.
I’ve had a copy of 201 Principles of Software Development by Alan Davis since around 1994 and love that book. It’s a set of short, one per page coverage of general, requirements, design, coding, testing, management, and other principles. An example is…
The LoOWD list really makes me think of that book. In fact what it made me think is that someone should publish the equivalent book for game development. It’s not about creating long essays but just short 1 or 2 paragraph descriptions of principles.