digitaldust

This rather infectious Ross Mayfield, Joi Ito, meme has even been sniffed out by CNET. When I first heard it I started thinking country clubs and elitism straight away, and the guy writing at CNET picks up on the same connotations.

There is a good, long and sometimes heated discussion about the concept over on Terranova. A lot of people try to focus on the differences, the social side is highlighted but the golf and sport aspect keeps coming back in for a lot of people. Guys, it’s not really about the golf. It’s just the same as a bridge club, mah jong or sipping G&Ts watching the cricket. The country club concept is the one that comes up again and again when thinking about this.

I wonder if this phenomena is more prevalent in Korea or Japan (golf the world over fulfills the same business/social function). With a greater penetration of MMOGs, especially in Korea, I would be surprised if Country Club Guilds werent more prevalent there.

Some good numbers from the International Heralid Tribune about full time Chinese gamers.

• Online gaming worth US$3.6 billion
• 100 million people go online to play computer games each month
• estimated 100,000 full time chinese game labourers

That’s a huge chunk of any game world being made up of farmers. In the article one of the sweatshop managers reckons that at any point 40-50% of online players might be farming.

“We could take over the world, the virtual world, that is,” One manager said.

And as always the publishers try to crack down on it. If you want to change things redesign the games… get away from a 25 year old game design with roots in pen and paper. Put the gold down and step away from the MUD.

Four guys get together to make 50 games in one semester at the Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center. While most are not games but interactive toys they’re still great. Tower of Goo is highly addictive, one of the best online toys I’ve seen since soda play.

An Analysis of MMOG Subscription Growth.

Mostly just a big excel graph. The one thing that I notice from these graphs is that expansion packs didn’t predictably drive growth spikes. I would assume anyway that due to the nature of expansion packs they are there to reduce churn not drive growth.

Part of a 6 week look at massively multiplayer online games, last weeks article was on the social aspects of game design. A goo dround up of the trials and tribulations of the last few years, but little hint of the future or any underlying principles. Except, don’t try to design and balance, don’t try to allow create an open system and hope for anarchic stability. So what do you do…?

A friend of mine who works at a game publisher just gave me a copy Conflict: Desert Storm II - Back to Baghdad - which has to be said with a really bad southern American accent. I’ve not played it yet, but it occurred to me that the US hasn’t copyrighted any of the gulf conflicts. I’m sure they ought to, so they can make money off the IP, charge royalties on all the product licenses. It may not pay off the entire gulf war bill, but with all the gulf war spin off products it might go part of the way.

Maybe when people do get in to wars they will think twice… does it have a good marketing angle? Angola or the Balkans - not very exciting. Big desert battles, much more exciting. Books, movies, games, the works.

Ah ha, I remembered what I intended to post about FF, when I was inflicted with Workus Interuptus.

Superhero MMORPGs. I thought that a Superhero world would be perfect to play within. I was thinking around some of the design principles that would apply.

Respawning villains would be perfect. Every now and then they would pop up again. No explanation, they just break out, resurrect, come back for vengeance, whatever. No one asks why villains respawn in comic books.

Also smaller worlds would be good. Rather than massive worlds with thousands of inhabitant, you could have smaller more socially integrated servers. There is one argument that the larger the social group the better the dynamics, the more interesting and diverse the social interactions. But with each game world/server in EQ it’s probably too big.

The game could start out with a new group of heroes and have the standard game villains come in at the same power level. The villains could then “level” with the heroes. Keeping track with them. Imagine the gnashing and grinding of teeth when the arch-nemesis pops up again and even though you’ve upped your punch power, he’s now tougher and wilier.

And while thinking about that I did a search and what do you know, one’s in production. City of Heroes. Star Wars Galaxies gets to lose.

I caved in yesterday and finally bought Freedom Force. On the back of the box it says it’s a Superhero tactical RPG. Man I’m such a sucker for games like these, Superheroes and RTS game all in one, and an especially tacky one at that, so tacky that it has a Connery voiced Submariner rip-off. You can see where they get their inspiration from as there’s a ton of fun Marvel rip-offs… Minuteman for Cap America, El Diablo for the Human Torch and a wall crawling Antman.

More supervillan pounding tonight.

DHTML Lemmings

A complete version of the old Psygnosis game Lemmings all done in javascript and using the browser objects. No flash or java. Wowee very impressive, a little slow at times but just playable. I’m going straight back now to nuke some more lemmings…

How to Hurt the Hackers: The Scoop on Internet Cheating and How You Can Combat It. An interesting article on how games will always be hacked and how you can beat it. Reminds me of the things I keep saying about building social software at the Beeb. We can’t protect against everything we need to build stuff that watches for the attacks and/or malicious behaviour and then finds ways to convince the offender that they have succeeded when in fact they haven’t. Always keep them on your radar, don’t block them or ban them, have systems in place so you can keep an eye on them. I’m mostly thinking here about social software and those who are trying to misuse the systems, game them.