Thoughts about something I’ve recently read.
Suvudu Free Book Library has a bunch of free downloads books from Del Rey — really great ones. Nice to see another free library out there. 🙂 And hey, Naomi Novik, Robin Hobb, Kim Stanley Robinson — hurry, go grab ’em!
Every once in a while, I get asked about doing an updated version of Theory of Fun. I generally reply that not only do I not have time, but that there’s fairly little that seems to merit updating. Plenty has moved on the political front, but science moves more slowly, and so most of the stuff that the book references as its underpinnings hasn’t seen any radical changes.
Then again, the book doesn’t dive all that deeply into some of it. I think the only reference to dopamine happens in the end notes, even though it’s central to the statement that fun doesn’t equal flow. (Arguably, the better update would be to surface that stuff more in the book…)
Well, the science does move some, and iHobo has a pair of great summary articles on Why You Play Games and The Biology of Compulsion which sum up quite a lot of the recent research on all this. Not only is it a handy reference, but there’s also a pointer towards the forthcoming book Beyond Game Design: Nine Steps Towards Creating Better Videogames, with articles by Bateman, Lazzaro, Bartle, Isbister, and others. My pre-order is in!
Edit: I don’t actually play EVE, just watch from afar. I’ve corrected some errors below that players of EVE mentioned to me. 🙂
A few days ago, everyone wanted me to write about the massive destruction of the Band of Brothers alliance in EVE Online, and how Goonsquad GoonSwarm finally triumphed via an act of betrayal.
But honestly, another day, another giant EVE scam. Ho hum. Is there anything really good to say about this?
For the uninitiated: there was a huge aliance named Band of Brothers. There was another clan named Goonsquad GoonSwarm who hated them (edit: well, everyone, really) and worked against them, but was not nearly as big or powerful. Goonsquad GoonSwarm would recruit BoB members in order to scam them. A BoB member joined under these false pretenses, but then chose sides and rather than be scammed, asked to join for real — and offered up BoB as his price of entry. He was a high-level admin of BoB, and he basically disbanded the whole thing, destroying it from within, and Goonsquad GoonSwarm made piles of virtual money.
The most intriguing aspect of the whole thing to me isn’t the way it happened, but the overall social dynamics of it — the fact that it was completely inevitable. There’s been lots of talk about how this was basically a sort of exploit, that one person should not have enough power to destroy the work of thousands. But I’ll make the case that this is exactly what CCP should want to have happen.
Blambot Comic Fonts and Lettering exhaustively goes through dozens of variations of word balloons and lettering choices in them.
I have often argued that in dealing with chat bubbles in MMOs, we should just steal these conventions, because so many people are familiar with them just by osmosis, even if they are not comics readers (many of these conventions are used in the funny pages too).
We had huge debates on SWG about whether to use “plain chat bubbles” or to invent something that was styled more like Star Wars. Plain won, in the end — and we ended up supporting regular, shout, thought, whisper, musical, caption, and more.
Neil Gaiman’s ‘Graveyard Book’ Wins Newbery Medal – NYTimes.com.
I think all I can say is “Hurray!”
This means that your children will be assigned Neil Gaiman in school at some point. 🙂
