Online World Design Patterns
A Powerpoint presentation that goes over the standard design patterns for avatars, online game mechanics, persistence models, spawning, map structures, advancement models, PvP models, narrative in online worlds, and lastly, communications systems. Much of it (but not all) was presented at GDC 2001 jointly with Rich Vogel.
This talk was an attempt to sum up everything I knew about the broad strokes of muds, in the early days of MMOs. A lot of the same material is covered in the abortive, incomplete book Insubstantial Pageants, also hosted on this site.
Video
This is available as a free video on the GDCVault. This video does not show the slides, only the two of us speaking! So you will want to follow along with the slides above.
