The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer
I’ve been asked what I think about the video game ban in California, which I note for the partisans was sponsored by Yee, a Democrat, and signed by Schwartzenegger, who is what passes for a Republican in California. My short answer is “I’m boycotting Girl Scout cookies.”
Leland Yee, co-author of the bill, was quick to sign up the California Girl Scouts, which he then went on to repeatedly stroll out at media events in order to drum up sympathy for the bill. Continue reading
Okay, so I’m sick today, and so it’s entirely possible that this story about the Smurfs getting bombed by warplanes in a TV ad is entirely the product of my twisted and delirious mind.
UNICEF’s first adult-only episode of “The Smurfs,” in which the blue-skinned cartoon characters’ village is annihilated by warplanes, has terrified young children… The reactions ranged from approval to shock and, in the case of small children who saw the episode by accident, wailing terror.
Nothing I could say today would amuse you as much as the Asheron’s Call 2 Quote File. Search for ‘OVERHEARD ON THE LIVE TEAM’.
Secret: almost every game has one. They don’t get published nearly as often as they used to, though. Kudos to Turbine for letting it out the door. Ultima Online 2 had one, and a programmer had the guts to post it for a day after we got cancelled, then it was retracted. Ahhhh, good times. (Link found on Corpnews)
You can take my civil rights, you can take my freedoms, you can take my privacy, but take my ability to take part in an 8 hour raid on Molten Core, and it’sTiananmen all over again!
As of August 29, more than 1,000 Chinese gamers had signed the petition opposing implementation of the new time limits. Chinese authorities said last week they planned to implement a new system that would deduct from the ability levels of online game characters after an individual had played a game for more than three consecutive hours. The system was designed to prevent online game addiction. The online petition is currently on http://bbs.wowchina.com.
Yeah, we’ve discussed this before, and it’s probably too optimistic to hope that our future history books will have to acknowledge MMO addiction as the tipping point that brought down the last communist superpower, but there were a couple parts of the article I found interesting. First was this:
“The new system has real potential to adversely impact online games in China, because the system will probably reduce total playing time, which is directly proportional to income for operators,” Huang said.
Interesting. This seems to directly contradict this:
In addition to the petition, gamers have also begun discussing counter measures to circumvent the impact of the new time limits. The most popular countermeasure suggested has been to open several accounts, so when the new timing system kicks-in for one account, players can then switch to another account and continue play. In fact, such a tactic would be beneficial for online game operators, an official with a leading Chinese online gaming firm, who asked to remain anonymous, told Interfax.
Based on how we play here in the states, at least, that second scenario seems a lot more likely. Of course, what’s interesting to me as a game designer is how these limitations will actually end up affecting gameplay. Huge WoW raids can take a lot longer than 3 hours to complete (which is, of course, certainly not unique to their game), and you can spend an enormous amount of your time waiting in queue to get into battlegrounds. Given how much money WoW gets from China, the interesting question is whether or not Blizzard makes changes to accomodate these new restrictions, and ultimately, whether or not other markets will get to benefit from them as well.
So I spent half of last week in Bloomington, Indiana (which was very lovely, I might add) attending a Ludium. Now you might be asking what a Ludium is. That’s okay. Dictionary.com doesn’t know either. Hell, I didn’t even really know when I signed up. But here is what the Ludium was meant to be, as written up by Edward Castranova of Terranova, who was the brainchild of the event:
What’s a Ludium? It’s an academic conference built as a live-action game. At this one, a mixed group of academics, MMORPG designers, and experts with funding contacts will compete to come up with the best ways to use avatars in university research. Anyone who reads this page knows that basic research using the technology of multiplayer persistent gaming will open countless new approaches to the exploration of human sociality. That’s valuable in and of itself, but there are all kinds of spinoffs that advance the agendas of others. There’s IP for businesses in this; information-spreading tools for foundations; policy levers for government. There are so many good research ideas that the question is not whether we should do anything, but where do we start? This conference will try to pick out the five best ideas and lay down, concretely, the pragmatics of working on them. Who benefits? How deep is the impact? What will this kind of work cost? Who will fund it? How quickly will the results be available?
I don’t normally watch and record Malcolm in the Middle, but as I was flipping through my program guide, the tivo gave a description that was something like this:
When Hal and Lois discover Malcolm and Reese’s plan to sneak off to the Burning Man festival, they decide to make it a family outing, with predictably disastrous results.
A lot of people have complained that there isn’t enough ’skill’ to MMO combat, and it’s too stat and advancement-heavy. There are a lot of reasons why, but one that isn’t mentioned enough is that skill-based games are usually twitchy, and twitchy requires a better Internet connection. A dial-up connection automatically adds at least 200 ms to your latency. And no one wants to be a repeatedly on the losing end due to lag times.
For ages and ages, broadband was a mark of the tech-savvy elite. As recently as a couple of years ago, we were told that only 30% of Internet users had broadband in their homes. Thus, it was too soon to make a game that was broadband-only, which has the possibility to unleash a whole host of new game design concepts that involved quicker responses and more skill. Continue reading
There is a scourge in the media today, a genre so perverse that it makes people better killers, and undermines the very fabric of a civic-minded society. I am talking, of course, about CSI. From the New Scientist:
There is an increasing trend for criminals to use plastic gloves during break-ins and condoms during rapes to avoid leaving their DNA at the scene. Dostie describes a murder case in which the assailant tried to wash away his DNA using shampoo. Police in Manchester in the UK say that car thieves there have started to dump cigarette butts from bins in stolen cars before they abandon them. “Suddenly the police have 20 potential people in the car,” says Rutty.
© 2024 Zen Of Design
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
Recent Comments