This is a concept I have always believed strongly in, and Raph Koster just wrote an excellent blog article about it: Ways to make your virtual space more social. He makes a lot of great points, but I am going to focus specifically on the concept that game developers must engage in some degree of social engineering when they make a game, and for a virtual world game they MUST take steps to force people to slow down, hang out, and socialize with others.

You Can’t Chat While Hammering the 1, 2, 3, Buttons

Continue Reading »

Netbooks are the new hot product in the computer hardware industry. Over 14 million of them sold in 2008, and they are the fastest growing product in computer hardware. They tend to be cheap, they are ultra-portable, and they cannot run high end games. Does this mean they are not a viable gaming platform? Heck no. What it means is MUDs and web based games have ANOTHER platform ripe for customer aquisition. The quest is whether MUDs will fail yet again to jump on such an opportunity. The web game companies out there are pretty shrewd, so I have no doubt they will seize the day.

If you are unfamiliar with Netbooks, then I recommend you read an article I wrote recently that gives you some of the basics: Netbooks vs. Laptops. That article does not go into the potential effects on the gaming industry, however. That’s what this blog post is for.

What Opportunities Do Netbooks Open Up for Gaming?

Continue Reading »

I have no idea why this feature is being ignored by the current crop of MMORPGs, but I am going to talk about it anyway because I think it is an important and extremely fun feature. Housing presents one of the best opportunities for players to express their own imagination and it gives them a “piece of the world” to call their own. Further, it provides the developer with many opportunities to make content more exciting if it involves a way for players to bring home a trophy they can display, or some other type of house oriented loot - carpets, furniture, cool artifacts, etc. I am going to focus this post on questions, rather than opinions, so the readers can give their own take on player owned housing without any bias or prompting.

What Player Owned Housing Features Do You Like?

Continue Reading »

I am really getting sick and tired of every MMO turning healers into pseudo-DPS classes. I don’t know who started this trend, but whoever it was needs to be chained up with the guy who invented bind on pickup crafted items, thrown into a pit, and have lotion lowered down to them while being reminded to put it back in the basket. There are a lot of gamers who actually enjoy playing true support classes and true healers. They don’t need OMFGWTFBBQ dps to keep them happy in between times where they “have to (omg I might hyperventilate)” heal.  This obsession with making healers into DPSers always causes severe balance problems. After all, why just DPS when you could DPS AND heal? This quickly results in nerfs, and for some reason developers always go straight to the heals for their nerfs. Imagine how that makes the people feel who actually play healers to… *gasp the horror*… HEAL?

(NOTE: That’s Dr. Cuddy, from House, M.D., if you are wondering about the girl<->topic connection.)

The Stupidity of this DPS Healer Phenomenon

Continue Reading »

The so-called “holy trinity” of class design has been around since the early MUDs. Yes, that means it pre-dates all the shiny, glowy graphical MMORPGs. It was a dominant feature of DIKU MUDs, whose original classes were fighter, healer, wizard, thief. That gave you tank, healer, and two dps (ranged and melee, but range was meaningless in pure room based MUDs). Things really haven’t changed much since then. At most, I would change it to only one of the following:

Tank, Support, DPS

or

Tank, Healer, Crowd Control, Support (buffs), DPS

Are you happy with this arrangement? Does this provide enough game play variety for players? If not, what are the flaws? What would you change (if anything) to improve it, tweak it, or overhaul it completely? And where do hybrids factor into all of this? Do they screw up the whole concept entirely or do they fill in the gaps where necessary? I know you all must have some strong opinions on this, so let ‘er rip!

No wonder developers don’t invest serious time into mini-games. I can barely get people to talk about them! It would be easy to misinterpret this as a lack of interest, but in 17 years of making online games I have rarely been disappointed with the results of a good mini-game. With almost no exceptions (I cannot even remember one off the top of my head), every mini-game I have ever put significant effort into has resulted in massive player enjoyment. Perhaps I need to turn this into more of a question than just praise for mini-games in order to entice a little more commenting! Read on for some specific questions you can answer.

What Makes a Mini-Game Good?

Continue Reading »

On June 11, 1996, I brought Threshold RPG fully online for the first time. I generated my first couple characters to make sure everything I had created was working. The game was playable, though it did not have a tremendous amount of content. It had a handful of “zones” and your character class (guild) options consisted of: fighter, mage, thief, cleric, and psion. With so many possible things to code, and so much in need of creation, what was the first thing I created at that point? A mini-game. I coded a deck of cards for playing 5 card draw.

Why Are Mini-Games So Awesome?

Continue Reading »

I imagine some of you have read a few of the articles from the last year or so where writers try to draw comparisons between raid leading in a game like WoW, and management in the business world. I seem to recall the Wall Street Journal even wrote about it. I must admit, every time I read an article like that it strikes me as a pile of BS. The ONLY place I have ever heard this tripe is in a few scattered articles that could easily have been bought and paid for by Vivendi. I have never read anything of the sort in a respectable business publication (WSJ is respectable, but as a daily it can freely include random garbage articles).

Why Are They Perpetrating This Fraud?

Continue Reading »

I don’t want to distract too much from the Designing a Religious Pantheon article, so instead of moving on to another game desgin topic I am going to direct you to three (non-game design) tech articles I wrote recently. Since most people reading this blog use the internet (hah!) and have an interest in technology/computers, I think you will find them at least moderately interesting or useful.

Alienware Desktop PC Review: 2009 Alienware Desktop PCs - Spoiler Alert: I don’t think too highly of them.

Firefox vs. Internet Explorer - User Base and Market Share Shifting to Mozilla - My question to you all: Is Firefox’s growth pretty much maxed out? Can they ever cross 50%? Will Google Chrome unseat Firefox as the IE challenger?

Building a PC - Choosing a Motherboard - I recently built two new gaming PCs. I hadn’t built my own PC for about 15 years. I learned a lot from the experience.

As promised, I am leaving the Wikipedia topic and moving on to another issue of Threshold’s game design. The religion system is probably one of the most robust and popular role playing features on Threshold. In this post, I am going to talk specifically about how the deities were created. I am assisted in this task by the recent discovery of an article I wrote for the webzine Imaginary Realities back in December of 1999. In fact, why don’t you click over to that article, then come back for a few more thoughts from me and some discussion: The Making of a Pantheon .

A Little More Insight into Threshold’s Religious Pantheon

Continue Reading »

EDIT: I promise this is the LAST POST ABOUT THE WIKIPEDIA incident for a while. The next post will be much different!

This is the last part, and for a while I hope the last time I’ll blog or post on this issue. There are role playing games that need my developer attention, and I loathe having my real work interrupted by this sort of thing. In this last section, I will focus on the bigger question that has arisen from the whole sordid mess:

What should fans and developers of MUDs/MMOs do now?

Continue Reading »

The article (and discussion) continues. For the full story, with all the details, read my article here: Wikipedia’s War on Gaming History and Threshold RPG .

So, what is wrong with Wikipedia and how can it be fixed?

Continue Reading »

This is an abbreviated version of the story designed to get some discussion going. For the full story, with all the details, read my article here: Wikipedia’s War on Gaming History and Threshold RPG .

1) Wikipedia is full of people gunning for an administrator promotion. In the current climate, the easiest path is getting articles deleted and getting players banned. These acts somehow show you understand what is best for Wikipedia.

Continue Reading »

People keep asking me to write about how and why I designed things, so I guess it is about time I actually broke down and gave the readers what they want. As I noted in a comment post, when I look back over my 16+ years of computer game design my failures stand out for me more than my successes. I don’t think that is negativity. I think it is just a bit of perfectionism mixed with a desire to never forget my failures in order that I not repeat them. In this post, I am going to discuss an absolute disaster of a design failure from the early years of Threshold : allowing players to attack (and kill) themselves.

Continue Reading »

I don’t do “tech news” type posts very often, but every now and then there are some technology issues I think it would be interesting to discuss. So here’s a grab bag of three issues:

1) A preview of Windows 7 (please be better than vista)

2) The MPAA getting a much deserved b-slap from the FCC.

3) And some insane patent related litigation that would be horrible for the MMO industry if it succeeds.

Continue Reading »