Think Like a Player! provides us with this handy list derived from the not-dead-yet-dammit world of interactive fiction:

The Player Doesn’t Know What’s Important

“…authors know what’s important in the text that’s mentioned and players don’t…”

• Don’t bury relevant messages
• Don’t make the player have to remember too much

The Player Doesn’t Think Your Game Is Special

“…games are special and magical and beautiful to the authors. To the players, on the other hand, they’re exactly the same as the three dozen other games waiting for their attention…”)

• The game must have something cool about it
• This should be the most interesting story to be telling
• Don’t do stupid things out of habit

The Player Can’t Read Your Mind

“Important things should be in the game, and things in the game should be important.”

• Puzzle solutions should be conceptually reversible
• The game shouldn’t tell the whole story, it should tell the right parts of the story

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AGC day two… a busy day.

Richard Bartle’s keynote–it coulda been me up there, basically. Yep, what he said. I think the tone of the conference as a whole is “change the world”–a phrase I heard used in at least four different sessions, and Richard’s presentation basically argued both that we do it whether we want to or not, and that there’s a specific culture that we are spreading, the hacker ethic, and that it’s a calling. So many people stuck around to ask questions and discuss the keynote that virtually every panel after it started 5 minutes late.

The user content panel has been discussed a few places already; it was entertaining. I thought that defining the spectrum of practices as “Vegas to Burning Man” was apt; the answer lies somewhere in between, of course. The audience was split evenly when DanielJames called for a voice vote at the end. I ended up choosing Burning Man, myself.

The panel I was on, regarding “who owns my lightsaber,” was entertaining to us panelists, at least. We were worried that we’d all just say “it’s the EULA, stupid,” but we moved past that to discussions that were interesting, I think.

The MMO rant panel once again echoed the “change the world” sentiment. Keep an eye out for Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green posting his rant, which was hysterically funny.

The presentation by the guys from PARC on key things that would improve social contact in MMOs was very useful and interesting. Eye contact, torso torque, looking where people are pointing, not staring, anims for interface actions so you can tell when someone is checking inventory, display of typed characters in real-time rather than when ENTER is hit, emphatic gestures automatically, pointing gestures and other emotes that you can hold, exaggerated faces anime super-deformed style or zoomed in inset displays of faces, so that the facial anims can be seen at a distance… the list was long, and all of it would make the worlds seem more real.

The dinner with far too many friends to mention, and then… off to jam with The Fat Man. My rendition of ‘Hotel California’ was well received, but once the classic rock segment ended when most folks had to leave, we got down to the real jamming. And as you see, here I am back at the hotel room blogging at 2:30am–that’s what a good jam will do to you.