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.

There.com is closing

 Posted by (Visited 15154 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Mar 022010
 

Sad news. There.com has some of the best social interaction design of any virtual world. Be sure to check it out while you can so that its many design innovations are not forgotten.

But, at the end of the day, we can’t cure the recession, and at some point we have to stop writing checks to keep the world open. There’s nothing more we would like to avoid this, but There is a business, and a business that can’t support itself doesn’t work. Before the recession hit, we were incredibly confident and all indicators were “directionally correct” and we had every reason to believe growth would continue. But, as many of you know personally, the downturn has been prolonged and severe, and ultimately pervasive.

We’re very sorry to announce that There.com will be closing to the public at 11:59 PM on March 9th, 2010.

via There – There.

Are virtual worlds over?

 Posted by (Visited 51997 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , ,
Feb 262010
 

Dan Terdiman at CNet engages in some handwringing over the fact that kids worlds and social games are taking over the hype that used to belong to virtual worlds.

But to someone who cut his virtual world teeth on more immersive, 3D environments like There and Second Life, these never-ending announcements of new companies trying to jump on the social gaming bandwagon have left me with one nagging question: Where is the innovation?

The innovation lies in making something that matters to ordinary people.

Now, I am a virtual world person, obviously. I don’t see much distinction between the game worlds and the non-game ones like Second Life. I have been working with them since the text muds, for over 15 years, which doesn’t exactly put me in the true old dino category where Richard Bartle and Randy Farmer reside, but I think it is fair to say that I have been closely identified with the space for a long long time now.

And I think that they aren’t over, but the form that they have taken is.

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Placeness is a feature, not the point

 Posted by (Visited 18348 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Feb 242010
 

so rather than worrying about getting a virtual world in a browser has #slviewer2 side stepped by becoming a mixed media browser?

– Ian Hughes aka @epredator

No.

Plenty of analysis is out there now on the new SL viewer — which is, undoubtedly, a big step forward. Full web functionality on a prim including Flash — check out Habbo Hotel running on a wall inside SL! A usable interface! Non-programmery design!

But the answer is still no, because for better or worse, virtual worldness is increasingly a feature of a website, not a destination in its own right. Placeness is a value-add to something else — a game, a community, etc. And adoption is driven by the something else, not by the placeness.

To phrase that differently: The new viewer makes Web integration a feature of SL. Which is a great value-add for SL people. But it is not a value-add for Web users. Wagner James Au breaks it down into a series of questions, but fundamentally the question a new user asks is “why?” And for a web user, the first question is “why go somewhere else?”

The SL experience might be a value add for Web users, but for that to happen, SL would have to be a feature of “something elses” on the Web, and as Mitch Wagner points out, it’s not.

Don’t get me wrong — a great step. But I would be surprised if Linden isn’t working on the larger problem.

Gameifying everything

 Posted by (Visited 18292 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Feb 182010
 

Just a little meditation here…

Lots of chatter this morning already over a speech given at DICE by Jesse Schell (author of the excellent Art of Game Design) on games Beyond Facebook: How social games terrify traditional game makers but will lead us to gaming everywhere.

I have a long long article brewing on Facebook game snobbery by traditional gamers… and Jesse touched on this in his speech. But he also touched on something that folks like Jane McGonigal have been talking about for a long time: the gameifying of the world.

Where is this going? Schell says that the achievements and incentives that have wired us into playing Facebook games compulsively will soon be built into everything. Your toothbrush, for instance, will give you 10 achievement points for brushing your teeth in the morning, Schell said. Then it will give you more points for brushing for the right amount of time. Then it will give you points for brushing every morning in a week.

You may also get credit for eating your Corn Flakes. If you take the bus to work, your local government will give you 10 achievement points for reducing traffic. You will get credit for walking to work, as your digital shoes will testify. If you kid gets straight A’s on a report card, he or she will get 2000 points. And the Obama administration will give you 5,000 points for being a good parent.

The quote starts someplace that sounds amusing to innocuous, and ends on a note that probably sounds disturbing (“good parent by whose definition?”) to many, particularly to those who are freaked out by the microscandal over Cass Sunstein’s behavioral economics approach to politics.

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Where’s kids MMOs are at

 Posted by (Visited 14991 times)  Game talk
Feb 172010
 

VW traffic for kidsThree years ago at a GDC panel, I said that big media companies were coming into the MMO space hard and fast, and would be the authors of the most significant releases. At the time, I was pointing at kids’ and youth worlds as the big area to pay attention to.

Daniel James replied on that same panel saying “I don’t think big media companies will be able to execute their way out of a paper bag” and Rob Pardo of Blizzard and WoW fame said “I don’t think the most important MMOs will come from big media.”

Well, here’s the Toy Fair (!) charts on MMOs that VentureBeat has published. The article breaks it down in tables — 7 from toy companies, 8 more from entertainment and media companies, and 20 more from independents. Oh, and two from established game companies. Kids’ worlds are by far the dominant form of MMO today, and many of them are rather not Diku-like.

Compare the below chart to the number of AAA MMOs released, and how large they have managed to get from 2007 to today. Note that below does indeed say that Poptropica is at 4.5m monthly users.

Was I right? Well… depends how you slice it. But I think that in terms of impact to the genre… yeah, these kids worlds and media-driven worlds are probably more important than most all the AAA MMOs released 2007 to today. Whether that’s a good thing… exercise for the reader.

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