Check out Raph Koster’s liveblog of Damion Schubert (of Bioware Austin, and author of a blog to which I subscribe). Here’s an excerpt of a pet issue:

Another stray thought: matchmake. We really should see more experimentation on this — EQ2 does cool stuff here.

Have you ever heard a rock band talk after breaking up? “It was like being married to five people.” Well, being in a raiding guild is like being married to fifty people. Guild drama fucks you up. And we let guilds form ad hoc, and let people find them randomly. How much stickier would things be if we could actually put people in compatible groups and let adults find adults instead of finding people who spell dude with zeroes?

I link this talk, because I think it might be a lot more interesting to gamers.  Also, because the end of his talk is truly must-read: if you read no other part of it, skip down to the part where he talks about his “third mental model”.  He proposes an interesting criteria to determine if you should add a particular feature to your MMO.

Schubert’s focus is on the MMO’s we’re most familiar with: big, graphic-intensive worlds. For another take, check out this article on Studiocom, the developers of the staggeringly successful BarbieGirls.com. Here’s their take:

“The first is the polarization between the hardcore environments and the casual environments,” [Studiocom Chief Creative Officer Juan Fernando Santos] said. “The first offer very visually intensive environments, like World of Warcraft and to a lesser degree Second Life. They’re great, and there are types of interactions consumers have that are unique to them. But there is another group of people who want interaction, but in a more casual way. Think about it like an enhanced instant messaging system. It’s about the interaction and community more than the visual metaphor. If you have a great visual metaphor, that’s great, but it’s not about particle effects. It’s about talking to people I like. Brands have more success here.”

There’s a ton of activity going on outside the core gamer MMOs, and it’s blurring the line between chat and game, social network and virtual world. This all coincides nicely with the blurring of the single player/multi player game distinction, and I expect that soon I’ll have little idea what I’m playing (and if I’m playing at all).

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 10:10 pm and is filed under Game Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.