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.

Don’t Display Negative Karma

 Posted by (Visited 7668 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
Oct 072009
 

Randy Farmer (he of Habitat fame, and much more besides!) and Bryce Glass have been posting excerpts from their upcoming book Building Web Reputation Systems on a blog, and today’s has a great anecdote in it that hammers home all the math behind negative reputation systems.

“Hi! I see from your hub that you’re new to the area. Give me all your Simoleans or my friends and I will make it impossible to rent a house.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m a member of the Sims Mafia, and we will all mark you as untrustworthy, turning your hub solid red (with no more room for green), and no one will play with you. You have five minutes to comply. If you think I’m kidding, look at your hub-three of us have already marked you red. Don’t worry, we’ll turn it green when you pay…”

If you think this is a fun game, think again-a typical response to this shakedown was for the user to decide that the game wasn’t worth $10 a month. Playing dollhouse doesn’t usually involve gangsters.

— Building Web Reputation Systems: The Blog: The Dollhouse Mafia, or “Don’t Display Negative Karma”.

There’s whole rough drafts of chapters on the site — totally worth reading, pondering, absorbing, and using.

Me, cantina dancing, and gasp, music!

 Posted by (Visited 4970 times)  Game talk, Music  Tagged with:
Oct 052009
 

A friend of mine spotted a familiar name under the musical submissions. You probably know Raph Koster as the designer of Star Wars: Galaxies, the ill-fated MMO. But folks at The Sixtyone know him for his selections under “folk and instrumental”. You can listen to them here. Unfortunately, they’re pretty good, so I can’t ridicule them.

But how would Raph Koster do as a cantina dancer? | Fidgit.

I think it is hilarious that this is news (of a sort, anyway). Blogged by the estimable Tom Chick, no less!

For the record, I wouldn’t do so well as a cantina dancer. Maybe in my younger days…

Flash comes to the iPhone

 Posted by (Visited 9635 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Oct 052009
 

Well, this is a nice end-run around Apple. In a nutshell: develop in Flash CS5, cross-compile to iPhone as a standalone app. Public beta later this year.

How is this different from Adobe Flash Player 10 coming to iPhone? Will iPhone users be able to view web content built with Flash technology in the iPhone browser?

The new support for iPhone applications in the Flash Platform tooling will not allow iPhone users to browse web content built with Flash technology on iPhone, but it may allow developers to repackage existing web content as applications for iPhone if they choose to do so.

Flash Player uses a just-in-time compiler and virtual machine within a browser plug-in to play back content on websites. Those technologies are not allowed on the iPhone at this time, so a Flash Player for iPhone is not being made available today.

Flash Professional CS5 will enable developers to build applications for iPhone that are installed as native applications. Users will be able to access the apps after downloading them from Apple’s App Store and installing them on iPhone or iPod touch.

Adobe Labs – Adobe Flash Professional CS5: Applications for iPhone.

This s a huge game-changer. Expect the App Store to get overwhelmed with Flash apps within days of this becoming available as every good Flash app is ported over. It’s another solid step on Adobe’s part towards making Flash a common rendering and development platform across multiple devices, too — Flash 10.1 is already scheduled to land on basically every other smartphone, and honestly, users don’t care whether it’s runtime interpreted or not.

Rolighetsteorin: a theory of fun

 Posted by (Visited 12278 times)  Game talk, Watching  Tagged with:
Oct 022009
 

I have search alerts set up on a variety of sites for “theory of fun.” Today this little gem popped up: Rolighetsteorin. It translates as “theory of fun for safety” according to Google, and it appears to be a Volkswagen campaign in Sweden that is trying to use fun for social improvement.

This page is dedicated to the idea that something as simple as happiness is the absolute easiest way to get people to change. That it does not need to be more difficult than to make things a bit more fun to have to change for the better. Which does not matter as long as there is improvement. For yourself, the environment or whatever you want.

An example of what they mean: getting dramatically more people to take the stairs instead of the escalator (which of course, provides more cardiovascular benefit).

It is fun to see the expressions on people’s faces as they puzzle out why the stairs (or the garbage can that makes a whistling cartoon “falling from a great height” sound when you toss trash in it) are there. The stats seem to bear out that there is an effect.

I would posit that the trash can would have diminishing returns compared to the stairs, because the stairs have expressive potential and are more of a toy; the trash can will get old since there is only one input and one output.

A glimpse into SL’s CS calls

 Posted by (Visited 7980 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Sep 302009
 


Tyche Shepherd has posted some great analysis and charts that give a glimpse into what it takes to run Second Life in terms of customer service.

Last week I mentioned that I had been storing Second Life Incident Reports since the beginning of the month to build up a database similar to my Region Survey Database. A forum lurker who wants to remain anonymous, who read this , contacted me in-world and sent me the full past 28 months worth of published incident reports (21600+). I cannot thank the person enough for providing this data…

In total I now have data which seems complete from 7th Jun 2007 up to the current time, at the moment this comes to 21665 published incidents.

What did the naughty people do ? – SLUniverse Forums.

For contrast, I just saw a Tweet from the #nygames hashtag (NY Games conference of some sort?) saying that

#nygames Playfish uses 3 support people to support is 50 million players – focused on users helping users to hold costs and scale up

Obviously, very different circumstances, but it still makes you think…

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