[shows a slide he put up at the very start, a photo of Blondie with lots of the Muppets]<\/p>\n
My opinion? I already told you, subtly: the name of Clint’s character in Good, Bad, Ugly was Blondie.<\/p>\n
\nMMOs will win because all that’s standing in the way is a bunch of muppets\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Q: Why do you see Educators as being so negative?<\/h4>\n
Computer games in general are good at teaching two things: facts, and higher-order problem-solving skills<\/p>\n
All the education money goes on something somewhere in-between, which is neither one nor the other.<\/p>\n
Can you teach people to integrate using games? Well, sort of, but you can do that more effectively in other ways.<\/p>\n
[Ha! I disagree completely. But … it’s hard, really hard, because practically all the good game design has ignored teaching to date, so we have almost no examples and almost no learning \/ knowledge to start from :( ]<\/p>\n
Games abstract out details of things to improve gameplay, but that means they often teach incompletely, e.g. pirates games teach a lot about the economy of the carribean, but completely miss out the slave trade, despite that being an essential part of the economy, the history, etc.<\/p>\n
Q: do you see a potential for developing a casual MMO?<\/h4>\n
Yes. Teenage boys are all playing Runescape, but the girls are largely unserviced as a market.<\/p>\n
Many parents can happily play an MMO internsively for 2-3 hour sessions, IFF they can be interrupted unexpectedly for 5-10 minutes at a time. e.g. because a child needs some help with something. MMOs currently don’t allow them to do this – if you drop out AFK for a few mins, the raid fails.<\/p>\n
Many retired people play poker and canasta online not because they like those games but because those are the only games that fit within their real-world requirements for commitment etc plus socialisation.<\/p>\n
Q: do you play WoW?<\/h4>\n
I’m a designer, so I don’t get fun from playing them.<\/p>\n
I get to see some wonderful design things, but I don’t need to play intensively to do that.<\/p>\n
In the past, people used to interpret this as “you don’t REALLY know, do you? You just think you understand”. So, just for those people I got three characters up to level 70.<\/p>\n
I’ll have to refresh my credentials when WotLK comes out, but I can say that nearly everything I learnt from WoW I learned by the time I reached level 10 – and the rest by level 20.<\/p>\n
[I asked him afterwards “what about raiding, high-end PvP, Battlegrounds, etc?”. He confirmed the above, and said that the details of PvP, raids, etc in WoW didn’t matter, that it was the broad design decisions which mattered, and those he already knew without needing to participate in them. Personally, I think it’s still critically important to understand the details, since so much of the success or failure of a game rests on the level of polish, and the polish is ONLY about these details]<\/p>\n
Q: Are MMO’s evolving quickly enough, or just putting prettier front ends on the same old idea?<\/h4>\n
AoC is clearly a WoW clone. [and then he traced it back through EQ, DikuMUD etc, as per standard analysis]. It’s nicely done, but it looks soulless, no-one’s trying to say anything through that game. EVE has soul, UO had some soul, EQ tried to have soul but didn’t really have any.<\/p>\n
Are you trying to say freedom or constraint? EQ et al offer freedom with one hand but take it away with the other, resulting in an inability to say very much really.<\/p>\n
I’ve never been [able to be] a player – I was a designer before MUD’s existed, because I co-wrote the first one, so I never got to enjoy that sense of delight and discovery of playing a game without looking at it as a designer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I just heard this talk at the MMOGfest academic mini-conference last week – apparently, it’s mostly the same as the talk he gave at the independent MMO conference earlier this year, but I think a lot of people didn’t manage to go to that one, so it seems worth reporting here. Like all the other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}