Game talk

This is the catch-all category for stuff about games and game design. It easily makes up the vast majority of the site’s content. If you are looking for something specific, I highly recommend looking into the tags used on the site instead. They can narrow down the hunt immensely.

But First, the Game

 Posted by (Visited 6013 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , ,
Sep 162021
 

In the last couple of articles, I might have spent too much time talking about big buzzwords – metaverse this and persistent state technology that. I get it, it can be confusing!

If I were to start throwing around even more technical stuff – like, how we drive Node.js from our highly-optimized C# server backend to implement a TypeScript-based scripting environment so gameplay code can be reloaded without a build or restart – well, plenty of people’s eyes might glaze over.

So instead, I want to talk about why our overall tech approach makes for better lives for our developers and better games for our players.

A fundamental truth

To make better games, we need to enable developers to iterate faster.

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Revealing Playable Worlds technology

 Posted by (Visited 7642 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , , , , ,
Sep 092021
 

Last week, I talked about “metaverse,” the hype around it, and how much of what people dream about is actually stuff online worlds have done for many years now. I ended the article on a bit of a tease, promising that I would talk about what we are doing.

I won’t tease this time.

We have built a metaverse platform.

Wait, did you say “have built?” Past tense?

Oh, it’s not done. We’re probably going to be working on this for years. But I say “built” because, well, we have the basics of this stuff working. 

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Online world or metaverse?

 Posted by (Visited 22949 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , ,
Sep 022021
 

A lot of people are talking about the “metaverse”, and as a result, a lot of folks are wondering what the heck that word even means.

Frankly, it’s a reasonable question. But as someone who has actually built, launched, and operated a metaverse before, I have answers!

I recently spoke at the Digital Economy Forum, hosted in Korea by the Ministry of Economy and Finance, and organized by the Korea Startup Forum. After the panel, we got the question “what’s the difference between Second Life and a metaverse?”

Here’s the short-form answer:

Online worlds lead to multiverses which lead to metaverses. And just about no one has actual metaverses to offer right now.

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Thinking long-term

 Posted by (Visited 4259 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Apr 152021
 

Another week, another post over on the Playable Worlds website. This time it’s about “engagement” and “retention”: those words which can be boogeymen for those concerned about the business practices of game publishers, but which are also crucial to long-term enjoyment of a game.

The first virtual world I worked on was LegendMUD. It is still running after a quarter-century. My second was Ultima Online. When I go to a UO player gathering, I see three whole generations of families who have played that game for 23 years now: grandparents, parents, and kids. Why?

Because running a game like this, a world like this, a service like this – this is a long-term emotional relationship with the player.

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Designing for Social Play

 Posted by (Visited 4431 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Apr 092021
 

Oops, I forgot to post about this yesterday when it went up!

I wrote about designing for social play for the Playable Worlds website. As you can see, I’m doing an article a week for now… that will probably change once we get more folks writing about what we are doing and inch ever closer to an actual reveal of what we are making.

In the end, good social design is about good society design. That’s what underlies the buzzword, and why it’s so sad that the word “social” gets reduced to mindless clicking or dark patterns on a social media site.

Diversity of people and of play makes for a more robust society, a more enduring community, in every way. That’s good for us as a business. More importantly, it’s better for players. It makes for an online world that doesn’t chase you out or make you feel insignificant or unwanted. A world where you can pursue your own dream.

From up close, from where we stand, we cannot see the shape of the whole. My hope is that by playing in a world like this, players come to realize the interconnectedness of all things.

If the ideas discussed there sound of interest to you, and you are a game dev — you might want to check out our jobs page — we’re hiring for a bunch of roles!

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