Zen Of Design

The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer

Month: November 2005 (Page 2 of 3)

Guitar Hero Rocks. Go Buy It.

November 13, 2005 /

If you buy the notion that fantasy fulfillment is the holy grail of what interactive entertainment can offer, then it may well be that Guitar Hero represents the pinnacle of what the games industry has so far created.

Words can’t do this game justice. Yes, it’s a rhythm game with a goofy peripheral, but when you hit those power chords, you feel like a metal god. When you nail that solo while powered up, the crowd goes nuts, and just for a moment, you’re transported. I had friends over on Saturday night, and even the guys usually content to drink beer and watch were clamoring for their turn.

I am concerned that the game is wrecking my technique playing actual guitars. But in terms of sheer fun, this is it. Kudos to Jason and John and the rest of their respective teams on a job well done.

How Important Is Personal Contact to Crafting?

November 9, 2005 /

This thread talks about Enchanting in WoW, and how the experience of enchanting suffers because players cannot sell enchantments at the Auction House.

And the problem with this is that the market functions poorly because of the enchanting market design: there is no marketplace, so the best you have is an open outcry system; there is no way to advertise; there is no way to connect services to the consumers of that service; etc etc. Perhaps other MMOGs have a better service economy, and I’d be happy to hear how they handle services. But I haven’t seen any where there is an active service economy.

Continue reading

Jack Thompson: Making a Machine That Runs GTA Is Like Another Pearl Harbor

November 8, 2005 /

I can’t believe I missed this story earlier: Jack Thompson has sent a letter to the Japanese Ambassador to America, attacking Japan for not condemning Sony for their part in publishing and promoting GTA – a game which is banned in Sony’s home country of Japan. The fact that Take Two is American, Rockstar is English and Sony just makes the hardware that runs the platform is irrelevant.

As a United States citizen who has been active and visible in opposing Sony’s distribution of hyperviolent and sexually explicit video games to children in this country, I would respectfully request that your nation’s government assist me in making this harmful distribution stop.

This request comes in the aftermath of recent news reports that certain local/regional governments in Japan will not allow, for example, the grotesque Sony/Take-Two/Rockstar Grand Theft Auto games to be sold to children in your country but Sony is more than delighted to distribute these games to our children in our country.

Continue reading

I Am Jack’s Disintegrating Client Prospects

November 8, 2005 /

What’s the one thing you don’t want to do if you are a lawyer attempting to specialize in video game violence lawsuits? My guess is get kicked off of a case, setting a precedent that you’d be an unwise choice. In a lawsuit regarding GTA in Alabama, the judge seemed to be leaning towards removing Thompson from the defense team.

“You said after the criminal trial to ‘have at it’,” Thompson said. The judge had imposed a gag order on lawyers until Devin Moore’s trial was over.

“Your ‘have at it’ and my ‘have at it’ are not the same,” the judge replied.

Last night, Jack pulled a ‘You can’t fire me, I quit‘, removing himself from the case. I would surmise that this is primarily to keep him still potentially hireable in the future – after all, whose going to take you seriously in future Pixelante trials if you got forceably removed by the judge for inappropriate conduct on the last one.

Sociolotron

November 8, 2005 /

Don’t know what to get that perverted narcissist on your Christmas list? I humbly recommend a subscription to Sociolotron. Just be sure to include this step-by-step FAQ on how to have sex with your alts. You know, with your other alts.

Link is not even remotely safe for work, taste or brain cells.

What You See Is Not What I See

November 8, 2005 /

Aggro Me points out that another SOE experiment hits Test soon if it hasn’t already: in Everquest 2, you will very soon be able to play using the alternate models developed for the Asian market (affectionately known in the community as the SOGA models – previously pointed out here). What’s interesting to me is the notion that different people are seeing different things.

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened, of course. When UO3D came out, there were 2D and 3D versions of all the art. The EQ2 stuff is more interesting to me, since you can get close and personal in both versions of the art (something you couldn’t do with old UO 2D art). Also, in UO it was clearly possible for you to look atrocious. It was possible for the 3D version of your 2D art to simply not combine gracefully, and if you didn’t have the 3D client, you might never know why people were laughing you. Continue reading

A SWG Dev Speaks

November 5, 2005 /

There’s another point of view on the entire SWG revamp up over here, and it’s a lot more relevant than mine as it’s written by one of the guys at Ground Zero. Jeff, a senior designer on the team, offers a refreshingly frank behind-the-scenes look at the development process and the reasoning behind these changes.

There’s no way we can do that.

There’s no way we should do that.

Man that’s fun.

The Man will never let us get away with doing that.

We can’t do it.

We shouldn’t do it.

Oh man that is fun.

When an executive producer sees something that is impossible to do, but which is too fun not to do, he makes a noise like “Hoooooooooph”.

Go read it.

Thoughts on Star Wars Changes

November 4, 2005 /

I actually have no value judgments to offer about where SWG’s design is going now, nor where it was before. I’m more intrigued by the larger picture.

When you invite players into your online world, you make a compact with them, that compact being that you won’t change things all too much. They have a reasonable expectation that the apple cart won’t be tossed too drastically. Sometimes, you have to. Sometimes, you make changes bigger than people were expecting. Sometimes, you add things which fundamentally change the social calculus of an online world, as the Honor System did with WoW. But in most cases, the game doesn’t change that much. For better or for worse. Continue reading

XBox TrueSkill System Reinvents 65 Year Old Wheel

November 4, 2005 /

The XBox 360 team was able to borrow the Microsoft Research team, in order to create the TrueSkill player ranking system.

It’s a more interesting problem than it seems. The gold standard for player ranking systems over the years has been the chess ranking system (the ELO system), which compares players and the opponents they defeat to rank them against each other. Beating up on newbies doesn’t help your ELO ranking if you’re high up – you have to play other high level players to improve. ELO is used by most 2 player game federations, including Chess and Scrabble. Continue reading

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