All-Everquest Game Studies issue

 Posted by (Visited 6041 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
May 052009
 

Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research has published a special issue, EQ: Ten Years Later. Among the articles:

  • Nick Yee on “Befriending Ogres and Wood-Elves: Relationship Formation and The Social Architecture of Norrath”
  • Greg Lastowka on “Planes of Power: EverQuest as Text, Game and Community”
  • Sal Humphreys on “Norrath: New Forms, Old Institutions”
  • Lisbeth Klastrup on “The Worldness of EverQuest: Exploring a 21st Century Fiction”
  • Bart Simon, Kelly Boudreau, & Mark Silverman on “Two Players: Biography and “Played Sociality” in EverQuest”
  • Eric Hayot and Edward Wesp on “Towards a Critical Aesthetic of Virtual-World Geographies”

There are also interviews with Chris Lena (with whom I worked in the R&D group at SOE back in the day, and who was producer on EQ for years); and with Brad McQuaid and Kevin McPherson. The interviews don’t appear to be recent, but they still give some great insight.

BMQ: Back when designing EverQuest and coming up with the various playable races, we looked at the more human-like races and decided purposely to make them in appearance similar to real world races. This is true also for the architecture, a lot of the background, etc. But the important point is that what we were trying achieve was familiarity. In other words, the Barbarians in EQ might have had a Scottish flavor to them, but they are not Scots; likewise the pyramids on Luclin might appear to be Egyptian in flavor or style to a degree, but there is no real relationship. This allows the game designer (or fantasy author, for that matter) to create races, cultures, architectures, etc. that draw on the richness of the real world in terms of depth, without actually being constrained by actual real life history or stories or, hopefully, if done right, too many preconceived stereotypes.

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The ludic fallacy

 Posted by (Visited 22009 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
Dec 092008
 

I was just pointed to this wonderful essay by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.

First Quadrant: Simple binary decisions, in Mediocristan: Statistics does wonders. These situations are, unfortunately, more common in academia, laboratories, and games than real life—what I call the “ludic fallacy”. In other words, these are the situations in casinos, games, dice, and we tend to study them because we are successful in modeling them.

–Edge: THE FOURTH QUADRANT: A MAP OF THE LIMITS OF STATISTICS By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It’s not the only ludic fallacy I can think of. Recently I had a discussion with a management and leadership consultant, and we were discussing the generational characteristics of Millenials versus Gen X in the workforce, and we were talking about how a gamer mentality may have affected the way Gen Y behaves in the workplace: more likely to follow the rules, more likely to work in teams, more needful of reassurance, less creative and risk-taking, less likely to see the full scope of irreversible consequences of a choice, and less likely to see things in shades of gray. In a way, these sound like thinking trained by games. Continue reading »

Why are corpse runs bad?

 Posted by (Visited 11870 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
Nov 172008
 

In a recent discussion over at f13, folks are cataloging “design errors” from past MMOs. And one of the ones cited was the notion of a corpse run. For those not familiar with this concept, this is where your character dies, leaves all of their stuff at the corpse, and you have to run back to where the corpse is to pick up your gear.

I argued that corpse runs shouldn’t belong on this list. It’s like calling the telegraph a design gaffe because phones replaced it. Corpse runs were (mostly) all there was at the time, and under the philosophy of “don’t change what works” would have been everyone’s default choice back then.

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MUD influence

 Posted by (Visited 21408 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,
Jun 272008
 

As part of the ongoing raking over the coals of Richard Bartle for saying the obvious (yes, you can tell what side I am on in those debates!), Steve Danuser says over at Moorgard.com » Sacred Cows

I get tired of people implying that today’s MMOs owe their entire existence to the MUDs of yesteryear. Sorry, I disagree. The gameplay style of EQ or WoW is obviously influenced by MUDs, but I propose that MMOs would have evolved anyway.

And Ryan Shwayder posts in comments saying

Ultima Online is a direct descendant of what MUD? I’m not saying it isn’t, I’m just saying that I don’t know what particular MUD had a profound influence on that game. It seems like the MMO industry was born of different influences; EverQuest from DikiMuds, Ultima Online from Ultima games. Not all MMOs have a lot of direct comparisons to MUDs, so I think he’s right that they’d exist whether MUDs did or not.

Well…

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How to hack an MMO

 Posted by (Visited 81585 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , , ,
Apr 172008
 

Given the recent hack to the blog, and also given the recent news of the decompiled Eve Online client, it seemed like a good time to go over some of the ways in which a virtual world gets hacked.

The interesting thing, of course, is that all the hacks I am going to talk about are actually not hacking the virtual world at all; they instead attack the client, which is your window into the world, and also your waldo, your means of exercising control over what happens in that world. And that’s because…

The client is in the hands of the enemy.

— The Laws of Online World Design

You’ve probably heard that before — I wasn’t the first one to say it, but it constantly gets misattributed to me. That particular phrasing may have originated with Kelton Flinn, but I am sure many of us came up with it independently.

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