The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer
To respond to the email I’ve been getting, Yes, this is true, for the most part.
No, I don’t know what I’m doing next. Yes, I have a good idea, but nothing is concrete. Continue reading
So on top of a tall pile of design tasks at work, I’ve been keeping busy outside the office as well. I’ve done a fair amount of speaking lately. I spoke at eGaDs last Tuesday, giving a version of the Casino talk I did at AGD. The interesting thing is that I’ve been to Vegas since then, of course (that update is still coming!), so I actually was adding new material to the speech, based on some observations I made on Superbowl weekend. Giving the speech was wierd, because eGaDs focuses almost exclusively on programming, and no one there expressed much interest in breaking into a designer role, but many felt after the speech that they had learned a lot anyway. So that felt good. Continue reading
It’s always kind of cool to see Meridian 59 acknowledged. You must understand, the game was a small hobbyist game that never wracked up big numbers even when 3DO put their weight behind it. 3DO published it with very little in terms of development or marketing investment, and used the disappointing results to claim that Internet gaming would never take off. Oops.
So it was with some pleasure that, when I finally watched The Video Game Revolution on PBS, they began their MMO chapter with a 2 second footnote about Meridian 59 being the grandfather of them all. Which is an oft-quoted claim, but isn’t wholly accurate – games like Legends of Kesmai, the Realm, Underlight, Dragonrealms and a raft of Mythic properties came beforehand or about simultaneously.
Meridian was first at something, I’m sure. What that is, I have no idea – something like “First 3D, Flat Monthly Fee MMO By A Major Publisher.” Funny how that ‘major publisher’ was outlasted by ‘the little guys’ like Mythic and Simutronics. One wonders if 3DO had invested in online to make a game of DAoC’s quality, if they’d still be around now. We really need access to ‘What If’ universes to answer vital questions like that.
Of course, PBS is cool and all, but it’s even cooler to see Meridian acknowledged, even in passing, by the boys over at Penny Arcade, who mention that EQ2 seems to be moving towards a free client model that the smaller games like Meridian and Puzzle Pirates use. Oh yeah, Meridian’s still going, a labor of love by this lunatic, who I note still bitches to me about bugs I left in Meridian’s code-base nearly a decade ago.
Wow, a decade. I gotta go sit down.
My fiancee got me a Vegas Vacation for my birthday. Is she cool or what?
I love the NFL, but I generally truly dislike college football. It’s sloppy. The tackling is atrocious, the playcalling worse. It’s typically unfair. The disparity between matchups on the field is tremendous, and far too many games end up being 60-3 blowouts. Continue reading
I only check the Onion once a month or so, so I was surprised to see they’ve added a sports section. I only mention this because the article “The Undertaker Forced to Manage Eddie Guerrero’s Funeral” made me laugh out loud.
By way of explanation, I should point out that I once dated a wrestling fan long enough to gain a passing knowledge of the ’sport’. In fact, my brother still resents being trapped into watching Pay Per Views at my place.
Just some other random thoughts from AGD.
The conference still has too many panels. Panels are good and all if the participants squabble (as Ted Castranova and the guy from IGE nearly did), but the best talks are when one speaker gets a chance to talk at length about some hair-brained idea he has. That’s actually how I sold my speech to the powers that be. In a panel, if someone says something totally on crack, the moderator steers things back on track, and too often you end up with a beginner’s course on any given field. To go off the deep end, a talker needs a chance to really be able to spout crack, and then have the time to back it up. Continue reading
I gave an AGD talk late Thursday on Casino Design, and how it can inform MMO design. I think more than a few people were surprised that I didn’t talk about the games at the casinos at all, and talked instead more about interior design of these spaces. I’ve put the Power Point presentation up for download here.
A quick and dirty bibliography: Continue reading
The other reason I haven’t been blogging: I wrote a long article about the next generation of Guild Design for Escapist Magazine. They wanted an article about guilds from the designer’s perspective, so I tried to come up with the top 5 challenges for designers to think about. Unfortunately, they trimmed out my german cannibal references. At any rate, feel free to let me know what you think.
I haven’t posted about politics in a while. I realized that everything I was saying was being said better and more thoroughly researched somewhere else. I also realized that half my game design audience may disagree with me. So I made a call after the elections – if it’s not about games, zip it.
The recent orgasm of Creationism-related news has forced me to pull my soapbox out from under the bed and tap on the microphone. Creationism is a topic that never fails to get under my skin. It is, ultimately, a plea to ignore science and logic, and an argument for us to move our children to the back of the science and tech bus. Continue reading
© 2024 Zen Of Design
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
Recent Comments