My design up to this point has been in notebooks.  There are a few qualities I really like about them:

• Diagramming is easy.  I don’t have to conform all of my thoughts to paragraph structure.
• They don’t require a computer (my laptop is heavy).
•  It’s easy to peruse old entries (I date all of them), so I can see what I was thinking a couple years ago.

There are also some shortcomings to my pen and notebook system, the bolded ones being the most important:

• They’re disorganized and unsearchable.  If I’m designing several things, either all the designs get mixed up in the same notebook, or I have to keep a stack of different project notebooks on hand.
• They’re not backed up.  I’d better not lose those notebooks.
• They’re difficult to discuss.   If I want to get feedback, I have to gather some friends together and discuss the ideas, or write up some ideas all over again in email format.
• They’re not collaborative.  If other people come up with great ideas during those discussions, they don’t end up in the notebook, and I’m likely to forget them.

I’ve decided I should probably move to software design tools, even if I have to give up some of the positives such as easy diagramming.  My first thought was a wiki: they’re easy to set up, and collaborative.  (I’d only be giving a few trusted people access.)  Is there something better out there?  Something more tuned towards design, perhaps?  I know there are tons of teamwork tools out there, but I’m not sure where to start looking.

Damion Schubert talks about the early days of Ultima Online. He remembers them fondly. The fans do too: particularly, the thousands of ways in which they could exploit game mechanics for fun and profit (or just griefing). Click through for some choice examples, such as building a staircase out of spoons to steal a fellow player’s loot.

It’s a point worth noting: we’ve all had tremendous amounts of fun with broken and overly punishing game systems.  In some cases it may be impossible to separate the bad part of the system– i.e. the reason we’ve left it behind– from the good it caused.  Sure, mob training turned into a PvP tool on PvE servers, but it did make for a more intense dungeon-running experience.  I’ll never again play a game with Everquest-like corpse runs, but they did make for a tighter-knit community.  Oblivion’s leveling and item-creation systems were ridiculously complex and exploitable, allowing you to become invincible well before the end of the game– at which point finishing the game becomes a bit of a dull chore.  On the flip side, I spent many hours thinking about my character build, reading Gamefaqs, and developing my equipment.

While playing the latest game with meticulously meted content or scientifically calibrated action/exploration intervals, do we lose a sense of surprise or even individuality?  Do we gradually catch on that our next reward, from what it is to when it happens, from its sound effect to its flashy graphics, has been a little too finely tuned to our primitive brain?  What’s the alternative: a game that leaves us bored, frustrated, and confused?  And would you buy that game?

I admit it– I’m a sucker for the hype. I enjoy the buzz leading up to an anticipated game’s release almost as much as I enjoy the game itself (or in the case of ilovebees, probably more).

So you can bet I’ll be at a midnight release tonight. I’ll probably go to BestBuy, and probably by bicycle to avoid the legions of criminals between my house and there. Think of it as another part of the pre-release fun.

If you pick it up, make sure to add me to your Live friends list (I’m Amphetamine; same as on Steam, for you Team Fortress 2 players). I hear you can go co-op up to four players, and I’ll be on tonight.

After my spectacular computer meltdowns (my new mobo still can’t recognize any hard drives for more than a couple minutes), I’m wary of self-assembly.  I want something with a warranty.

However, I don’t like most of the parts the mainstream desktop sellers use: crappy cases; low-end video cards; cheap RAM; loud fans.  The sellers that do use good parts tend to have extremely high markups.   I also don’t need the things they want to sell me: hard drive; monitor; keyboard; video card; operating system.

I used to go to Monarch Computer for this sort of thing.  They let you buy a box with just what you wanted inside– no parts forced, not even the CPU.  They’re gone.  Newegg doesn’t have systems.  Dell’s site breaks frequently under Firefox, and I doubt their systems would be suitable, if I could get them to work.  Is there a site that has what I’m looking for?  Or should I just try my luck with another mobo+CPU combo, and hope it doesn’t all end in tears once again?  The problem’s gotta be there, right?  …  Right?

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).

I’m trying to find sites that use a particular CMS package. As part of my query, I’m looking for index.php and numbers in the URL (like so: index.php s=0..999).

Alas, Google provides me with this response:

We’re sorry…

… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.