Revisiting the Laws

 Posted by (Visited 6877 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Jan 032009
 

No, not me. Razakius, over at Razakius.com, who is working on what looks like an ongoing project to revisit every Law of Online World Design.

This does happen every few years — someone decides to do a series revisiting them. I think this is healthy. The last new Law was “Socialization requires downtime,” which was a while ago.

One of the nicest things about the Laws, I think, is that when you read them they are so clearly high level that so many of the little design cul-de-sacs the Diku genre has fallen into are obviously not applicable. Nobody has asked for “PvP is evil” or “PvP must always be in RvR form” or some such to be put on there, for example.

On the other hand… never had to remove one yet, either. Not sure whether that is troubling or not!

Wired makes the case for more torture in games

 Posted by (Visited 7041 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , ,
Dec 152008
 

If you weren’t sick of this debate already, here’s more.

So this, really, is the problem with World of Warcraft‘s torture sequence. It does not model any consequences. You torture the sorcerer, but nothing particularly comes of it. You just move on to the next quest.

This would be lame in a TV show, but is arguably even lamer in a videogame, because it’s not too hard to imagine all sorts of repercussions that would have been dramatically fascinating while actually enhancing the gameplay.

For example, Lich King maker Blizzard Entertainment could have made the Art of Persuasion quest optional — but endowed it with some unusually lucrative loot or experience. That would have made it a genuine moral quandary: Should you do a superbad thing for a really desirable result?

— “Why We Need More Torture in Videogames“, Clive Thompson in Wired

Worlds.com VW patents to be enforced?

 Posted by (Visited 8790 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Dec 122008
 

Virtual Worlds News is reporting that a law firm has been retained to enforce the Worlds.com patents on 3d virtual worlds. These patents are quite old — filed in the early 90s — and center around visibility culling of avatars in various ways.

Worlds owns U.S. Patent Nos. 6,219,045 titled “Scalable Virtual World Chat Client-Server System”  and 7,181,690 titled “System and Method for Enabling Users to Interact in a Virtual Space.”

Together the claims describe systems for tracking the spatial relationships of avatars and objects in client/server systems and managing their interactions as well as how many can be displayed at any given time.

It will be interesting to watch what comes of this.

Why are corpse runs bad?

 Posted by (Visited 11930 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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Virtual worlds in the ambient cloud

 Posted by (Visited 9483 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , ,
Sep 102008
 

The Web is moving towards a user-centric experience. Whereas a few years ago, it was all about visiting destination sites, now it is about destination sites spitting out data that comes to you, via RSS. The attraction of things like Twitter or Facebook lies in the ambient information that flows out and about, and in your largely asynchronous, largely placeless, largely shallow updates on what your friends are doing. You come to know them deeply not by engaging deeply with them, but by building up pictures of lots of small actions they take.

Compare, for example, the destination-like IRC versus the ambient Twitter. Hardcore Twitter fans use it almost in realtime. They answer people, with their @fred syntax convention. They have a better history, perhaps, because they can search the stream in a way that IRC doesn’t really support. But more importantly, you follow Twitter by filtering it; it’s one big stream, and you take little bits of it out. It is as if IRC were all one channel, and you happened to build an aggregate channel of just the people talking that you wanted to hear.

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