Online Alchemy signs up for Emergent’s Metrics Element. I believe they’re the first company to sign on since Bioware and TimeGate.
Larry Mellon and Mike Steele are behind that metrics middleware, and between knowing them and seeing their presentation at AGC last year, I’m confident that they’re on the right track. If you want a metrics system and you want to pay somebody to do it for you, Emergent is worth a look.
Congratulations on the new deal!
Did you know they’re data mining our children?
Just as adware often incorporates spyware, games can also be used to gather various types of user information. Through data-mining, chat analysis and other forms of automated surveillance, player input can be turned into valuable market research data. This can range from statistics on player demographics and in-game activities to more nuanced findings about the ideas and opinions players communicate while gaming or participating in related forums. With advergames, this transformation can also lead to direct and detailed feedback on the effectiveness of particular ads and techniques. The feedback loop between advertiser and player is thereby brought full circle, from market research to reception analysis and back again.
The horror! The author doesn’t say whether or not Neopets and the like use the data to improve gameplay, but who cares? They’re data mining our children!
I hadn’t heard about it before, but California Assemblywoman Lori Saldana’s “new bill making it illegal for companies to embed spyware in their games” sounds a little broad. Will fear of marketers lead to an outright ban of client-side data collection?
I’m not too worried, because as an MMO designer, I don’t care about the client a whole lot — the settings I want to know, like which abilities you have on your hotbar, I like to store on the server anyway. But this could hamper our ability to look at your machine settings — data programmers use to reproduce client crashes and estimate system requirements. And it could hamper our ability to keep games fair.
Does anybody have any more information on the California bill? Should gameplay analysts be worried?
Everybody says that worldy MMOs are dead, but Runescape sure does sound a lot like Browser UO. This oh my god won’t you think of the children article describes a world rife with swear words and mean people and scammers and PKs and rare purple party hats and gambling in the form of random treasure drops.
Somebody needs to make a Browser Shadowbane for the kids to graduate to.
Former EQ GM complains that we keep rehashing the same old shit and don’t know how to design gameplay; clearly doesn’t understand why and how the same old shit works.
I was going to say “some single-player designer who played WoW for a while,” but when I checked his company’s website, I realized the “former EQ GM” angle was even better.
Christ, crafting minigames again? You can’t make business deals when you’re playing Tetris. Twitch gameplay? Alas, poor server … and alas, poor non-traditional gamers who make up a significant portion of modern MMO subscribers. Mobs of mobs? Man, you thought that server was on fire before! User-created content? Ha. “Would it really be so bad if player A and player B had different game experiences as a result of the world being altered?” Um, YES. If something is worth pointing out to your groupmates, they better be able to see what you’re talking about, or they’ll a) waste CS time and/or b) think your game is a buggy piece of shit.
Work on a live team for a couple of years before you start making grand proclamations about how terrible we are at game design. I thought that CS would count — I mean, isn’t that Ground Zero for learning about team resource allocation, what with the terrible tools and having to tell players that no, we weren’t able to get around to fixing that bug for the third year in a row? I guess not.
The Gametime LiveJournal has an excellent article on the gender iconography of Dragon magazine covers. It’s many pages long and has many charts. I particularly liked the page on submissive depictions by gender.
Shamelessly quoting the author’s findings:
# On Dragon covers, males are depicted more often than females (males in 69% of covers, females 49% of covers).
# Male figures on Dragon covers hardly ever (10%) wear suggestive attire, but female figures do so frequently (40%). When there is a figure in suggestive attire on Dragon a cover, it is highly likely (74%) to be female. These trends have been worsening over time.
# Most (67%) of the submissive figures on Dragon covers are female. This female majority has been getting larger over time.
# Most (68%) of the heroic avatar-friendly figures on Dragon covers are male. This male majority has been stable for a long time.
# Most (60%) of the men you see on Dragon covers are heroic (avatar-friendly) types; only a small minority (10%) appear in a submissive mode. In contrast, only a minority (38%) of women appear as heroes, and nearly as many (29%) appear as submissive figures. The male proportions have been stable over time, but the female proportions have been variable.
(via Jade Reporting via Guilded Lilies)
Conventions are good. Assuming you’re targeting your game at an audience with a few shared game experiences under their belts, conforming to systems, controls, and UIs they’ve seen before is generally not a terrible idea, as long as you’re aware that what’s best for your game experience comes first.
So, uh, good old Ultima Online is getting a new UI in its latest expansion pack.
The interesting part is that it looks like they finally compartmentalized the inventory. No more hiding stuff from thieves by putting a book on top of it. The fact that there’s only one bag icon makes me think that you can still nest containers, though.
As long as you can still trap nested containers, it’s all good.
Wait, you can’t steal anymore, right?
It’s been a long, long time.
(via Kotaku)
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