The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer
Raph links to a great article about Second Life, which comes to the conclusion that Second Life is a Ponzi scheme, or something similar.
No, SecondLife is a classic pyramid scheme. Or, more of an Amway-like pyramid: partially legitimate, partially ponzi. Sure, there are plenty of legitimate SecondLife customers who just like to go there to get their kicks, spend a couple dollars, and be on their way.
Probably the best WoW Machinima I’ve seen to date yet.
It’s easy to build an adversarial relationship with your community. It’s hard to recognize and encourage really cool things in the community. One of the things that’s really cool in communities is when they go meta. Continue reading
The French’s luck with the Burning Crusade has proven better than their luck with the actual Crusades. OK, lame setup, but it still merits mention that a French player has already hit level 70 in WoW, a scant 28 hours after the expansion launched. This is after many players posited it would take ‘months’ to reach the level cap. Note to would-be designers: it never takes ‘months’. Stop thinking it, or at least stop saying it out loud.
As an aside, congratulations to the Blizzard team for a relatively smooth launch day for the expansion, save the server queues driven by renewed interest in the game.
Me, I haven’t gotten it yet, but then I’m on my 360 kick right now, so it will probably have to wait a bit.
For a while, the Second Life backlash was going so strong that I was considering, albeit briefly, actually whipping out a couple of posts in defense of the Linden Labs boys and sticking up for them, just to be contrarian. But to be honest, I can only take so much of the fanbois who keep trying to explain, in patronizing terms, that we simply don’t get the vision of Second Life.
I get it. I read Snowcrash. Second Life is no Snowcrash. Second Life is a marvelous experiment with some real potential behind it, but it has severe issues holding it back in both design and technology, and until it actually addresses them, it will never even get into the same ballpark with its own hype. Continue reading
One of the more interesting articles that spurred a lot of discussion last week was this Gamespot article on Hellgate that purported that the game might become an MMO once you hit a certain point in the game. Money quote:
Roper explained that the cool thing about Hellgate: London is that you can play it as a single-player game, but there will also be an option to turn it into a subscription-based multiplayer game if you want to play with others and enjoy lots of new content.
Yeah, yeah. Disney, like everyone else with IP, is looking at getting into MMOs. This would actually be a pretty boring article if it were not for this bit.
Thousands of people can play on the Web at once in massively multiplayer online games, or MMOs, which essentially never end. Popularized by games such as “Ultima Online”, many are based on medieval or science-fiction themes that attract male players.
But in recent years, virtual worlds such as Second Life, where big corporations including Dell Inc. and Sears Holdings Corp. have built virtual businesses, have attracted a broader and older audience.
In a move that was, in their own terms, inevitable, Linden Labs announced that Second Life would make their client open source. Van Hemlock offers the first salvo of opinion.
The timing is interesting. Second Life has recently dealt with all manners of abuse, including billing security issues, stability issues, copybot, grey goo, and other degenerative attacks on the system. Releasing the source code will make it easier for attackers to find vulnerabilities, at least in the short term. Continue reading
A couple bits of news today, from two companies hoping to be the first thing people talk about.
First off, Tabula Rasa is taking beta requests. Note: don’t look for this information at tabularasa.com, which apparently is a ‘fansite’ so ad-infested that the popups have popups. You need to go to NCSoft’s home site if you want to see crucial information, such as pictures of the art director dressed as a banana. Continue reading
Some time ago, I wrote that living in UO in the early days was like living in a Dali painting. Dan Rubenfeld has something pretty similar to say, with, I might add, a mention of evil sewing kits of death.
And yes, this is positive reinforcement aimed at getting him to post more.
© 2024 Zen Of Design
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
Recent Comments