Over the course of a loooong time, me and Nicholas Lovell from gamesbrief, argued about whether or not free to play games are the bright new future of gaming. I am traditionally against the current implementation of F2P gaming (although I’ve softened on this a bit). Nicholas is traditionally very pro. See who you found most persuasive in our little debate…

Let us speak today of MMO websites.  I visit loads of official MMO websites, both for work and my personal interest, and it is absolutely appalling how many of them appear to be slapped together by Geocities monkeys from 1998 with no greater understanding of what such a website should do or offer.  I often find myself very frustrated when I’m trying to find some basic information, the latest news, or God forbid, an RSS feed.  You’d be surprised how many official websites do not have an RSS feed.  It’s like they’re in denial about modern technology even while running a highly sophisticated game.

I've uploaded Hoverbattles to its own server on EC2, and it has been running fine with an uptime of over 96 hours so far, and this is great!

http://hoverbattles.com

I've wanted to share a few of the mistakes/lessons learned writing and deploying a multiplayer game built entirely with JavaScript on top of NodeJS and WebGL for a while and this represents an opportune moment to do so.

I've gone with a brain-dump of various related learnings, as well as a couple of periphery items - first off, we'll go with the reason I couldn't keep Hoverbattles up on the old server.

It all started with Snow Crash.

If I hadn’t read it and fallen in love with the idea of the Metaverse, if it hadn’t made me realize how close networked 3D was to being a reality, if I hadn’t thought I can do that, and more importantly I want to do that, I’d never have embarked on the path that eventually wound up at Valve.

By 1994, I had been working at Microsoft for a couple of years. One evening that year, while my daughter was looking at books in the Little Professor bookstore on the Sammamish Plateau, I happened to notice Snow Crash on a shelf. I picked it up and started reading, decided to buy it, and wound up devouring it overnight. I also started thinking to myself that I had a pretty good idea how about 80 percent of it could work right then, and wanted to implement it as badly as I had ever wanted to do anything with a computer – I had read SF all my life, and this was a full-on chance to make SF real. So I tried to start a project at Microsoft to do a networked 3D engine.

We have been fighting over who gets to play with the Sifteo sample here at the office. These little blocks are addicting! Imagine all the fun of your favorite puzzle games meeting the touch-sensitivity of your smartphone meeting the accelerometer of your Wiimote. And the best part? It comes with the ability to write your own games!

You work for the Transportation Security Administration, manning the x-ray machine at a local airport. Your day begins easily enough, quickly scanning passengers’ luggage and bodies and waving them through. But after a few minutes, you get an alert—shirts are now contraband. OK, fine, you dutifully strip people of their T-shirts as they pass through the metal detector. Then another alert: Mobile phones are prohibited, too. Wait, now coffee isn’t allowed either, but cell phones are OK again. As you struggle to keep the new rules straight, the line of cranky passengers gets longer. Wait, snakes and turbans have just been outlawed. Oh, and shirts are allowed now, but you didn’t realize that until you’d already stripped down another passenger. That’s one strike against you. Now native headdresses are forbidden, turbans are OK, but shoes must be removed. You get confused and let a snake through—another black mark. The line of passengers begins to stretch across the room even as new regulations keep coming in faster than you can process them. Before long, you are fired—not because you’ve endangered anyone’s safety, but because you failed to cope with the illogical edicts of a capricious bureaucracy.

I’ll preface this by saying that yes, I’m running Google Chrome Beta as my main browser, and yes, some bugs are to be expected from running a beta browser. That’s besides the point. So what am I complaining about?

Any small bug on any browser can instantly kill a product you’ve worked months or years on.

 
[This text, on the crucial aspects of virtual goods design, is an extract from the ninth chapter of Social Game Design: Monetization Methods and Mechanics, by Tim Fields (Certain Affinity) and Brandon Cotton (Portalarium). In the book, the two authors closely examine how social games function as a player-responsive business.]

Fake Estates

The very phrase "Virtual Goods" is something of a delightful contradiction. Anything "virtual," by definition, doesn't physically exist, and goods, at least when appearing within the context of the marketplace, are typically an article of trade.



For our purposes, though, virtual goods are real enough that they generate billions of dollars in revenue each year, and are so important to players that they can drive binge play sessions, provoke real-world fights, create (and destroy) marriages, and keep users spending money twenty-four hours a day, in almost every country in the world.

ROM Hacks make the process of developing a functional Sonic game with unique art, enemies, and modifications much easier, since the game engine and basic mechanics are already functional. However, if the game requires a different game engine, modifying existing low-level assembly may be inappropriate, and some game designers might choose to program their own unique game engine. The physics of a game engine are rules that describe how to transform the player's input (either in the form of buttons, keyboard, or even a mouse if the designer feels inclined) into appropriate changes in the position of the sprites in the game (such as the Sonic sprite, or alternatively, how enemy sprites will respond). These physics guides will hopefully make the process of simulating the rules used in Sonic games easier.

Since the rules themselves are independent of how they are implemented, many people choose programming languages such as Java, C, C++, Python, or a Lisp dialect to implement game physics. In addition, people can choose to use more specialized applications like Flash, Game Maker, or a Clickteam program like Multimedia Fusion 2.

Hopefully, these guides will provide adequate information to facilitate implementation.

I love stories. My chief hobby is reading. I was formally trained as a writer, not as a game designer (there wasn’t really any formal training for game design I got started, but that’s another story). I think most game stories are not very good. And I quite enjoy games with narrative threads pulling me through them. When I find a game with a good story, I frequently prefer to the story to the actual game! So please keep that in mind as you read: I love story.
Narrative in a game is not a mechanic. It’s a form of a feedback.

There will be no escaping games in 2012. From the Olympics to hit shows on TV, lucrative games on your mobile phone to innovative live events, games are more a part of our everyday lives than they’ve ever been.
This briefing document looks ahead to the key issues that can help guide your strategy in 2012. And, since the gaming world evolves fast, we’ve drawn some concrete examples of these trends from front-runners in 2011, so you can get to grips with what they mean in practice. 

Cut the Rope is an immediate favorite for anyone who plays it. It’s as fun as it is adorable. So we had an idea: let’s make this great game available to an even bigger audience by offering it on the web using the power of HTML5.

To do this, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team partnered with ZeptoLab (the creators of the game) and the specialists at Pixel Lab to bring Cut the Rope to life in a browser. The end result is an authentic translation of the game for the web, showcasing some of the best that HTML5 has to offer: canvas-rendered graphics, browser-based audio and video, CSS3 styling and the personality of WOFF fonts.

You can play the HTML5 version of Cut the Rope at: www.cuttherope.ie.

Sometimes you’re asked to design for the untestable scenario. For instance, design a system for 10,000 players to asynchrously interact in a persistent competitive world with progression mechanics that plays out over 3 months.

Okay, after a little bit of basic background on class vs. skill based RPG systems yesterday, I’m going to talk about some of the advantages, disadvantages, and general design features of class-based RPGs

Is a video game still a video game if there's no... video? Designer Adam Henriksson grabs that question by the horns with Pockit, a game console concept that has no graphics whatsoever. Instead, it's a Wii-like motion-sensing wand that "encourages everyone to be physical and have a reason to break norms," he writes. Rather than waving the wand around in front of a screen -- which is the only way you get to see what your wand is representing--the Pockit moves that aspect of the game experience into your own mind's eye. Whether you've configured the Pockit to be "running" a swordfighting game or something else, the point is that the players are focusing their attention on each other in real life, not virtualized avatars.

My sense is that brand managers are approaching games in the wrong way. A few years ago they were all into creating virtual worlds but that didn’t really work out. More recently they went through a phase of creating social games, but again no luck. Now they’re keen to commission digital agencies or game developers to create gamified sites or software for brands, which will inevitably become coupon schemes, badges and leader boards.

The vast majority of these projects are utter failures because they end up creating vapid digital services with no soul. The ones that do succeed often do so accidentally (for example, because they were unexpectedly fun). Games are a cultural product, and like any other culture there is a line where commercial relationships become nakedly self-serving, and no customer finds that sexy.

Perhaps the branding industry should consider branding games rather than gamifying brands instead, if only for the reason that it’s more likely to work.

Over the years, my job gave me the priviledge of meeting amazing people. People who had a deep impact on my career, on my knowledge, on my personalty, and on what I am as a whole.

That must be why I am so fond of stories about game development that focus on people. The technology keeps changing, but the motivation that drives it remains. The people who shaped one way or another what our industry looks like today are for me an endless source of inspiration and motivation.

So I decided to share with you a few books I recently read, both have the same focus on the people behind the technology rather than on the technology itself.

As a bunch of “old-school” RPG fans hang out here, we’re accustomed to griping about how “dumbed down” RPGs have become over the years.

But it’s not just our favorite genre. As much as we complain about RPGs becoming first-person shooters, first-person shooters aren’t what they used to be, either.

To illustrate this point, this excellent video by kmooseman

See if this sounds familiar to you:

To play the game, you put currency into the machine. You then pull the knob and wait for the result. When the result is presented, you are rewarded with a cacophony of exciting sounds, attention-grabbing images, and some form of currency. Often times, this winning helps you progress towards a larger goal. You also have the opportunity with each play to win a rare prize of significantly higher value than the value of the currency you contributed to play the game.

That’s a slot machine, right? Wrong. It’s the basic action loop of FarmVille.

Cow Clicker is a Facebook game about Facebook games. It's partly a satire, and partly a playable theory of today's social games, and partly an earnest example of that genre.
You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom "premium" cows through micropayments (the Cow Clicker currency is called "mooney"), and you can buy your way out of the time delay by spending it. You can publish feed stories about clicking your cow, and you can click friends' cow clicks in their feed stories. Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence.

When I was younger I cheated in every game. It started with the likes of Warcraft 2 and Duke Nukem 3D. I cheated because I was about 11 and wasn’t all that good at games. I liked to cheat because that way I was in control of the game. I could do whatever I wanted, mostly. I’d get really annoyed if a game didn’t have God Mode because I’d have to worry about using a code to restore health or armour. Now I rarely cheat at games, but cheating was a gateway into another form of play. Cheating got me accustomed to playing games wrong. Doing things the developers hadn’t intended. Playing games wrong gives you a different perspective on something you love. I present some of my favourite instances of games played wrong, with some musings about why it was so fun.

Although the study of digital games is steadily increasing, there has been little or no effort to develop a method for the qualitative, critical analysis of games as "texts" (broadly defined). This paper creates a template for such analyses by developing and explaining four areas that game researchers should consider when studying a game: Object Inventory, Interface Study, Interaction Map, and Gameplay Log. Through the use of an extended example (The Sims and three of its expansion packs: Livin' Large, House Party and Hot Date) as well as examples from different styles and genres of games, the case is made for employing these four areas or components as a (developing) methodology for the critical analysis of one or many digital games.

I was thinking back to those long-vanished days recently as I stepped on the plane to Anaheim, California. My destination was the Major League Gaming (MLG) Pro Circuit, brainchild of Sundance DiGiovanni. MLG started its life in 2002 featuring primarily console games, but experienced unexpectedly large growth with the release of Blizzard's StarCraft II in 2010 (read our review). After arriving in Anaheim, I experienced this growth myself as I found my way to the end of a gigantic line stretching all the way to the end of the Anaheim Convention Center and into the adjacent parking lot. Passing tourists with their Mickey Mouse ears would sometimes turn and stare at us, and I could see them thinking: who were these people and what exactly were they lining up for?

Gamification is a polarizing and divisive topic with many proponents and vocal skeptics and cynics. But it is not bullshit. Gamification is real and its benefits are tangible. Gamification is here to stay.

Bernie Maddoff is in jail for the next 150 years. He misled investors with a Ponzi scheme, a scam in which you promise people a high return on investment, which you pay not with any real business, but with the money new investors give you. In real life, this is fraud, and if you are caught you will go to jail for it. In a game, for example if I offer you a dodgy deal for a street in Monopoly counting on the fact that you are bad with numbers, this is part of the game and I won't go to jail for it. It's just play money. But what of situations that are in between?

The role of a visionary on a creative project is an essential and demanding one.  Many companies that consistently produce great products owe much of their success to their visionaries;  Apple has Jobs,  Pixar has Lasseter,  Nintendo has Miyamoto, etc.  But visionaries are nothing without talented teams to realize their vision.  Vision needs to be communicated, reinforced, inspected and adapted to the emerging reality of the game.  This is the visionary’s fundamental responsibility to the team.

The finalists for this year's Games Media Awards have been revealed ahead of October's ceremony in London.

Organisers have whittled down the list of finalists from thousands of nominations, with 17 magazines, 20 websites, podcasts and blogs, and 26 writers up for an award, with the winners to be chosen by a panel of industry figures.

The formula for the perfect game may be an area of hot discussion, but most would argue that games that are easy to get into and difficult to put down goes along the right lines. Players' early experience of a game is critical: this is the period in which they're making up their minds whether to devote more time, and often money, to the rest of it. 

So how do we make games with a polished early experience? Let's take some lessons from a game which I think does it incredibly well, PopCap's Plants Vs Zombies. 

Usability testing is on the increase led by companies like PlayableGames and Vertical Slice in the UK, and Microsoft Games Studios having offered their gameplay lab services to their exclusive developers for Xbox from before 20031. Yet it can be regarded as expensive, troublesome to organise and just a distraction from making features for a game product.

It doesn’t have to be.

Games are becoming more Web-like, and the Web is becoming more game-like. If you need proof of this, you have only to look at Yahoo Answers. Random questions are posed, the top answer is chosen, and credibility points are given to the winner. It’s a ranking system that accumulates and unlocks more and more features within the system. It works because of the psychology of achievement and game mechanics and thus encourages interaction. This raises the question, what can a Web designer learn from games, or — more specifically — video games?

We (PopCap Games), in partnership with Information Solutions Group, published a report on social game users earlier this year.

The research covered 5,000 social game players in the US and UK, and found that the average social gamer is a 43-year old woman. But the reality is much more multi-faceted... here are the key findings:

Among the nearly 5,000 consumers who responded to the survey, more than 1,200 play games on social networking sites and platforms at least once a week, qualifying them as "social gamers" for the purposes of the survey. Two-thirds of all qualified survey respondents are U.S.-based. 55% of all social gamers are female and 45% are male — with the disparity being even larger among UK consumers (58% vs. 42%). The average age of social gamers is 43, with U.S.-based social gamers averaging 48 years of age compared to 38 for those based in the UK. Further, 46% of American social gamers are 50 or older, compared to just 23% in the UK. Only 6% of all social gamers are age 21 or younger.

Game Developer Magazine

OK, so this basically gives me permission to ramble on a bit about how games evolve over time. Designers can stop reading now, there's nothing here you don't already know...

I suppose, as I'm stating the obvious, I should begin by pointing out that there are four kinds of changes that happen to games.

I don't play golf. But if I did, and I'd tell my colleagues at the office that I spent €250 on a golf club, they would nod wisely and say that this is what a decent golf club costs. But if I told them I spent 2,500 hours on the driving range training, they would think I'm crazy. Online players think differently. They'd nod wisely if I told them I spent 2,500 hours in an online game, and think I'm crazy because I spent €250 on World of Tanks. I didn't spend 2,500 hours in WoT, but I did 2,500 battles, so well over 250 hours, which at less than 1€ per hour still is cheaper than most other forms of commercial entertainment.

WoW Should Have Died

Let me put it another way: our industry’s “common sense” tells us that WoW should have flopped when it launched. It was the most expensive launch fiasco we’d ever seen!

Common sense says you don’t recover from mega-sized technical disasters. As evidence, we have a long slew of failed games before and after WoW, which we write off as “Oh, of course they failed, their launch was poor.” We still believe that getting the launch right is critically important to a AAA-level MMO’s success.

Keybote by Jesse Schell about Game Caharcter Design at the Unity Unite 10 Conference

Sifteo cubes are 1.5 inch computers with full-color displays that sense their motion, sense each other, and wirelessly connect to your computer. You, your friends, and your family can play an ever-growing array of interactive games that get your brain and body engaged.

Sifteo’s initial collection of titles includes challenging games for adults, fun learning puzzles for kids, and games people can play together.

If you’re an MMO designer, and you *still* don’t grok the griefer-mindset, or you somehow hope/believe that “one day, there will be no griefers”, then maybe this RPS interview with the always-fun-to-watch Goonswarm will help you:

Some companies keep a playbook of product tips, tricks and trade secrets. Zynga has an internal playbook, for instance, that is a collection of “concepts, techniques, know-how and best practices for developing successful and distinctive social games”. Zynga’s playbook has entered the realm of legend and was even the subject of a lawsuit.

Monsters and monster stories suit the culture that creates them. You can see this pretty easily by looking at the ancient monsters that ancient cultures created.

In western Europe, "eat me" monsters dominated, and the vast majority of both monsters and monster tales involved being killed and eaten. Vampires do not spread their state by a bite, they simply squat on your chest, eating your breath, until you die. Werewolves, similarly, just kill and eat you. Only later were new attributes introduced that made these monsters into their now-familiar forms.

At the recent LOGIN conference, I was on a panel entitled "Wannabe Farmers replacing Pretend Mass-Murderers: Are Social Games a Fad?" To make the panel more interesting the panelists took extreme positions, and I was the solid "social (network) games are a fad" guy. Not that I believe that entirely, but it made for an entertaining panel discussion. (I'll post a link when the talk is posted online.)

But, I mentioned something that I think is very true: business works in cycles. And, by looking at previous cycles we can use them to divine the future of the current cycle. Let's take a closer look, shall we?

Why are players playing your game?  What motivations did you inspire in them?  Are they the motivations you wanted?

In just a few short years we’ve seen reward systems in games evolve beyond measure — from what was once a simple quest for points to a whirlpool of reward systems…what’s a designer to do?  Take a deeper look at your game, and look at what rewards you’re giving the player — and more importantly, why you’re giving them.  Adding a reward system to your game can often feel like a wild stab in the dark, which is why so many games have turned to the shotgun approach — throw everything in and hope that one catches the players.  Even worse, you could throw a reward system into your game without even understanding what motivations it gives your players.  We can do better than this.  Let’s take a look the reward systems, reasons behind the rewards then talk about how to use them effectively.

Yes, we turned Office into a game! If you're going to spend time immersed in the inner workings of Office, by golly it should be fun. In Ribbon Hero 2, the player will hop on board Clippy's stolen time machine and explore different time periods. With each time period, they get to explore a new game board with challenges they must complete to get to the next level. Each challenge takes the player into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or OneNote to complete a task. Discover new Office features by actually using them, with a hint button to fall back on in case you get stuck. Race for a high score with colleagues, classmates and friends, or even put your score on your resume to show off your Office skills!

Since it’s quite a long time after GDC 2011 and I never found the time to do a proper conference report, I thought I’d at least do a link roundup.

"Gamification efforts have come under criticism from many in the games industry for being shallow..."
Yes, you got that part right.
"-- that is, lacking the narrative quality of games made with a pure entertainment motive."
I don't think you understand the criticism, then, if you think "shallow" simply refers to "less narrative quality".

Pretty much ever since we finished Kivi's Underworld I have had two very different and opposing viewpoints of the game. On one hand I think Kivi is a really cool game and I'm glad that someone made the game. On the other hand I think that Soldak developing Kivi was a mistake. I'm going to talk about both viewpoints a little.

If this (i)Pawn app from Volumique turns out to be real, it could really change the way some games are played on the iPhone, iPod Touch and the iPad. The game, which is supposed to be available sometime in November, uses a set of physical playing pieces, or tokens, that actually interact with the touchscreen. Now we’ve already seen iPhone-friendly styluses, so that’s nothing new, but what’s really intriguing here is how the app is able to recognize the individual playing pieces.

There used to be nothing better than going to the store, buying a brand new game, and putting it in your system of choice to sit down for a nice day of gaming. This should be a grand moment: you just bought a game you're excited about playing, and the publisher has your money. These days, however, it has become a wonderful opportunity to punish you instead.

Here's how that goes down, and what I don't want to do when I buy a new game.

My son Eli has been using iPad apps since he was one and we have about 50 toddler apps. With the big caveat that this post is based off essentially a sample size of one, here are some toddler app user interface guidelines.

Angry Birds may seem a simple game that is substantially without a narrative structure. And why is it so addictive? The common explanation is that many of us are addicted by it because of the clever usage of “tap & drag” to sling birds, and the cute resulting effects. Its success is the result of luck, of getting the right effect at the right time – this is what I heard developers say, last time a few days ago at a lunch with a couple of iOS developers.

I think instead that the addictiveness of the game is rooted not just in the clever artillery physics, and is not a result of chance. I am unconvinced that it lacks a narrative logic, and here try to articulate myself.

In her new book, Reality Is Broken, Jane McGonigal argues that the rules, rewards and feedback offered by modern videogames can be used to make the world a happier and more productive place. We sit down with her to learn more.

A selection of free and members-only videos, audio recordings and slides from the 2011 Game Developers Conference, which took place earlier this month in San Francisco, are now available to watch on GDC’s Vault website.

Included in the free material are the classic game postmortems which took place this year, all of which include slides and footage of early builds, design documents and insight from their creators. Highlights include Eric Chahi on Another World (Out Of The World), and how during development he became obsessed with what everyday objects, notably potatoes, might look like built from polygons. John Romero and Tom Hall conduct their first Doom postmortem, showing off alpha versions (including the first level built in Romero's editor) and Hall's aptitude for interpretive dance.

MUD: Messrs Bartle and Trubshaw's Astonishing Contrivance by Bartle, Richard (GDC Online 2010)

Mike Dailly, one of the key men behind Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto, has just posted the design documents for the original GTA on his Flickr pages. Race’n'Chase, as it was originally intended to be called, began life on the 25th January 1995 in a design doc authored by K. R. Hamilton. The version posted is 1.05, from 22nd March, explaining how the multiplayer racing game would perhaps also feature a cops and robbers mode. And it makes for excellent reading.

This is a free, community driven Q&A for professional and independent game developers. It is a part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A websites, and it was created through the open democratic process defined at Stack Exchange Area 51.

Why is it that over 50 million individuals have downloaded this simple game? Many paid a few dollars or more for the advanced version. More compelling is the fact that not only do huge numbers download this game, they play it with such focus that the total number of hours consumed by Angry Birds players world-wide is roughly 200 million minutes a DAY, which translates into 1.2 billion hours a year. To compare, all person-hours spent creating and updating Wikipedia totals about 100 million hours over the entire life span of Wikipedia (Neiman Journalism Lab). I say these Angry Birds are clearly up to something worth looking into. Why is this seemly simple game so massively compelling? Creating truly engaging software experiences is far more complex than one might assume, even in the simplest of computer games. Here is some of the cognitive science behind why Angry Birds is a truly winning user experience.

Do you have dusty games in the closet that you grew bored with years ago?

Do your kids beg you to play with them, but you can't stand another round of roll-the-die/pick-a-card, move-your-piece, do-what-the-space-tells-you-to-do, and somebody wins a few hours later?

Do you want to add fun and excitement to your life without spending a dime?

In the last fifteen years, board game designers and dedicated board gamers around the world have learned a thing of two about what really makes board games fun for adults. The principles used in modern board game designs can be used to help you rejuvenate your old board games. You, too, can learn to love board games again.

For Zynga, the success of FarmVille was exciting for sure. But it was also a ticking time-bomb. Suddenly, FarmVille had amassed millions of players who were farming their crops, building their buildings, and slowly leveling up through the game very quickly.

But for how long?

Many of these were players who had never been so involved in a game before. What were they going to be doing a few months from now? A year from now?

Both of these options would mean a disastrous and mighty fall for Zynga, which at the time was still a young company. But it was easy to imagine — growing from 0 to 80 million users in a little over six months, a reversal in the next six months could happen just as fast.

But Zynga wasn’t going to let this happen, and through quick thinking and brilliant execution, it was able to defuse their 80 million strong time-bomb and keep their flagship franchise going.

Sometimes all a design needs is a little pick me up.

There are many times in life when it seems like there’s no hope, when you’ve tried all the options, when you’re just spent, and you just give up. Your project that you’ve been working on has sold a few copies and has received mediocre reviews, and you think that you would have a better chance with another idea.

But sometimes it’s not the design or the idea of the original game that counts, it’s the execution. Sometimes the design is a potential blockbuster, all that’s needed is strong perseverance to keep working on it, promoting it, and making it better until it fires off like a rocket ship. Sometimes failure isn’t have a design that isn’t successful; failure is just quitting before an unsuccessful design is turned into a winner.

I’ve never been fully satisfied with the definitions of ‘play’ and ‘game’ that have currency in Game Studies. Where I really have trouble is when I try to apply them to the fields of ethics and the philosophy of law in which I now tend to write.

In my recent analysis of sports law and the historical relationships between violence, criminal law and governance (focusing on duelling, boxing, rugby etc) I’ve been searching for an explanation of what is going on when sport is left to get on with it - free from ‘magisterial interference’, as the London Prize Ring Rules of 1838 put it.

I’ve touched on some of this in a recent post (People play online http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2011/02/people-play-online-.html) – but what I did not focus on there was a more formal characterisation of the thing at the centre of sport and games i.e. play.

As promised in the talk itself, here are the slides for the talk I just gave on “Social Mechanics for Social Games” — an updated version of the talk I gave back at GDC Austin.

Brace yourselves, readers, this week's column is going to be another adventure in pitching hypothetical new game concepts that I have no time to make myself and don't expect anyone else to attempt either. This is one I've been thinking about for a while and for which the aftermath of my DC Universe Online review will serve decently enough as a vehicle, because it concerns RPGs, or at least, RPG elements.

Eyewitness Accounts of MMO Hacks, Griefs, and Cheats on a Grand Scale
Put enough people in one place and sooner or later someone will test the boundaries. MMORPGs are no exception. Ranging from the hilariously frivolous to the monetarily disastrous, here are five stories of player-fueled negativity that have made an indelible mark on massively multiplayer gaming, plus a bonus interview of gamers taking extraordary steps to restore one MMORPG to its former glory.

The Assassination of Lord British

The Game Prodigy strives to provide game design articles and discussion that are immediately practical to readers. We believe that a game design resource should be as useful to game designers as a programming how-to is to an engineer, or a style guide is to an artist. Game design discussion should be useful, concrete, and understandable.

Game Design in itself, not game programming, not project management, but just deciding what to build, is a difficult problem in itself. There are common problems in game design that have been solved, and designers should have access to those solutions from other games and developers instead of having to retrace the same steps.

For this reason, at The Game Prodigy we focus less on theory and more on results. We look at case studies of successful designs and see how we can use them in our own games. We discuss the merits of different designs and what platforms they are appropriate for. We avoid talking about designs in a vacuum, instead saying, “This design was used in this context and produced this result.”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Bayonetta. I gave up on it about a month ago, mostly because I found it tedious, incoherent, and punishing (purely from a receptive standpoint), but also because I felt embarrassed playing it. I found myself having to explain the indulgence to my partner, who, while sitting next to me on the couch or passing by the TV, would reel in horror as Bayonetta’s porn star Barbie body fought doll faced angels with stripper like finesse. From an outsider’s perspective, Bayonetta is an encapsulation of all that is wrong with videogames. But I don’t think that is entirely the case, and the shame I felt had more to do with the reception of my partner than what I was actually feeling while playing the game. In fact, quite unexpectedly, Bayonetta exhibits feminist resistances lacking from most other games; however, it is ultimately a failed project because these resistances are not adequately engaged with patriarchal hegemony. Or to put it another way, Bayonetta needs to learn from Lady Gaga.

​It's hard to keep track of every event in gaming's past. The industry has grown, fallen, and expanded for over forty years, and it shows no signs of stopping.

The are many wonderful books that follow extensive history of video games, but we'd like to talk about five films that should be watched for a holistic view of the medium. Some of these films may be hard to track down, but check them out if you can because they will make you understand the way other people play games.

When you are a game designer, you become more attuend to this phenomena, but it is all around us. In games, we really notice it. In fact, a talented journalist once reviewed kudos by saying “it’s just watching numbers go up, but sometimes, that’s all you need”. (or words to that effect.)

Mohan Srivastava, a geological statistician living in Toronto, was working in his office in June 2003, waiting for some files to download onto his computer, when he discovered a couple of old lottery tickets buried under some paper on his desk. The tickets were cheap scratchers—a gag gift from his squash partner—and Srivastava found himself wondering if any of them were winners. He fished a coin out of a drawer and began scratching off the latex coating. “The first was a loser, and I felt pretty smug,” Srivastava says. “I thought, ‘This is exactly why I never play these dumb games.’”

Bruce Rogers and I graduated from Facebook’s Engineering Bootcamp in January and began researching how HTML5 could apply to games across the Web. We found HTML5 poised to become a potent platform for game development but still hampered by significant performance variance among browsers and drawing techniques. We're hosting a tech talk this evening on what's becoming possible with HTML5 this evening along with speakers from Zynga and SproutCore which will be streamed live.

As I've said before, good UI and readable, maintainable code don't mix. But lately I've been inspired to revisit this topic, because it's an idea that has been popping up in other venues as well

1999, San Francisco, Triton Hotel: we meet in person for the first time. We had found each other via our medium, the networked computer and had a brief but passionate virtual love affair. We got to know each other doing what we loved doing most, making websites and interactive artworks online. We begin living and working together soon after. 2003: Leaving behind careers of net.art and web design, the two of us radically redirect all our creative attention towards the medium of videogames. February 2005: After 2 years of designing and prototyping, our first project 8 is rejected by games publishers, then the only source of funding. We are devastated but determined to continue and to keep our independence. Reboot. September 2005: Launch of The Endless Forest. October 2006: presentation of the Realtime Art Manifesto at the Mediaterra festival in Athens. January 2007: Drama Princess engine complete. March 2008: Launch of The Graveyard. March 2009, San Francisco, Triton Hotel: launch of The Path.

Christmas is usually pretty fun in our family, and I do my best to add to the flavor of the season. I still make weird faces for the group picture (my hope is that my family will not have any “normal” photos for my funeral collage and instead will have to put pictures of me with my finger up my nose while they weep and say, “We will miss him!”), and I still come up with bizarre wish lists.

Kinect is a new video game system that is fully controlled by bodily movements. It's vaguely similar to the Wii, but doesn't use a controller (and doesn't have the associated risk of banging up your living room if you lose your grip on the Wii wand during an aggressive tennis swing).

Kinect observes users through a video camera and recognizes gestures they make with different body parts, including hands, arms, legs, and general posture. The fitness program, for example, is fond of telling me to "do deeper squats," which it can do because it knows how my entire body is moving. Analyzing body movements in such detail far exceeds the Wii's capabilities, though it's still not going to put my trainer down at the gym out of work.

It’s really, really easy to exceed customer expectations by doing one simple thing: Have the customer’s back. Customers want to feel like someone is on their side, and being on the customer’s side is the job of the community team.

Increasingly I find myself drawn to games that have a sense of progression, a feeling of permanence, or some other ‘value’ beyond the immediate sensation of fun. I guess I’m a pretty ambitious, and long-term thinking person, so that naturally spills out into my gaming habits. I want my gaming time to be an investment.

Playing video games is a time-consuming business. Even the shortest games can take upwards of four hours to complete.

Time, by contrast, is limited; and spare time is an even dearer commodity.

Why then should I prefer to spend time playing games over other activities? I’m not suggesting that I shouldn’t, but there must be a very good reason to justify spending a precious resource.

Exactly how much fun is it possible for someone have playing a game? My game design philosophy has always been that games create an Experience. For the vast majority of games that are made, I would say around 99%, the core experience that companies, student developers, and indie developers are shooting for is for the game to be fun.