http://t-machine.org Internet Gaming, Computer Games, Technology, MMO, and Web 2.0 Thu, 21 Aug 2008 09:33:57 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en So, spurred by the recent updates to Moshi Monsters (http://moshimonsters.com), I though I'd take a look at the product overall. Economy Given the background of MindCandy's founder, and the core of it's previous product (Perplex City - a tradable collectible card game), it's hard to imagine that Moshi Monsters isn't pushing as ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/08/08/moshi-monsters-review/ Moshi Monsters has launched two major updates recently, one cosmetic (allowing your monster to buy "clothes"), and one functional (changes to the Daily Puzzles computer game, which is the core of the MM product for now, since it's practically the only way to gain money to spend, and is required ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/08/08/moshi-monsters-version-2-overview/ (and because it's not going to happen with FF, it's something that Web 2.0 devs have to consider providing themselves) "Show CPU usage and memory usage for each open window / tab" ...because with that one little (*) feature the community of firefox users could probably very rapidly track down all the ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/07/28/wishlist-feature-for-firefox-and-for-web-20-apps/ Next up, in my continuing look at sign-up processes (trying to get MMO companies to ALLOW you to PAY for their products...) for MMO games: Nexon, and their free dance game, "Audition". Step one, download This is lovely and easy. It's a free-to-play game. You'd hope for this. The download is quick ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/07/24/patchers-audition/ Kongregate, in detail I'd been meaning to write this up for a while. It's something I've said verbally enough times now that I'd rather write it up and send people a URL :). A lot of people underestimate Kong (www.kongregate.com), including, I suspect, many people in the games industry. IMHO, even ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/07/07/kongregates-ratingreputation-systems/ Yahoo recently posted a page listing and describing eight different design patterns for a reputation (or ranking, or achievement) system for a community - where community could be a web community, the players of a particular game, etc. For a long time now, I've been meaning to write a post ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/07/01/reputation-and-ranking-systems-for-online-games-and-web-games/ I'm seriously fed up with the mediocrity (you could use worse words; I'm being civil here) of most MMO publishers' patching systems for MMOs. The very least you should expect as a player, even back in 2001, should have been something akin to the PS3 / 360 patching systems today: ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/06/09/mmo-patching-how-it-ought-to-be/ Edward Hunter, comScore Summary Some useful stats, and some interesting issues raised in terms of privacy and practicalities of gathering stats. A lot of good advice on how to select a target market for an online game that's better than "any hardcore RPG players" - both better as in more precise and usable, ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/05/22/ion-08-understanding-the-online-gamer/ Nicole Lazzaro Summary I think Nicole is wonderfully off the wall, and this lecture underlined that. At the very dull GDC "roundtable" (where less than 10% of the audience opened their mouths) this year on Free to play, Pay for Items, she came out with the idea that we should be looking ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/05/22/ion-08-wow-vs-facebook-is-social-networking-the-new-casual-game/ No writeup from me (hey, I was giving the talk, I can't do *everything*), but there's already a good almost-transcript up over at massively.com which gets the gist of things pretty well. To go along with that, here's the full slides from the talk (6 Mb). The originals were Keynote (OS ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/05/14/ion08-web-20-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-internet/ I found Scott's blog the other week, and liked it. So, I added it to my feed reader. Now, I'm removing it, because the way he's got his RSS setup - http://www.hartsman.com/feed - is unreadable (literally - only the first 100 words or so of each post is included, the rest is ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/04/14/antiquated-rss-feeds-scott-hartsman-im-looking-at-you/ Web 2.0 strategies often say "we can't compete with our users, there's too many hundreds of millions of them, and actually - collectively - they outmatch us in almost everything we do. So we're going to bring them into our company, we're going to let them develop the products, we're ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/03/10/are-you-pro-community-or-anti-community/ Summary Speaker: Derek French Given the title, this talk came far short of my expectations. At the end of the talk I also felt extra annoyed that it felt like half the talk was just waffle, mostly towards the end with lots of repetition of the same vague opinions over and over ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/02/24/gdc08-the-bioware-live-team-building-community-through-technology/ Summary Speaker: Eyjolfur Gudmundsson, CCP I want a full-time economist working for MY company. And: CCP staff should give more of the GDC talks, they're good. And entertaining. In the midst of a week of depressingly dumb comments (on the topic of economy: what possessed Matt Miller to argue against microtransactions because accountants like ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/02/24/gdc08-virtual-greenspans-running-an-mmog-economy/ Summary Speaker: Michael Smith, MindCandy Another half-hour-long introductory topic talk from the Worlds In Motion summit. Short but sweet. A nice overview of lots of different things going on in the use (and sales) of real-world goods as part of online games / virtual worlds. Misses out plenty of things, but does ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/02/20/gdc08-thinking-outside-the-virtual-world/ In case it's not obvious enough, I'm tagging all my session-writeups this week with "GDC 2008" (HTML | RSS). Mostly I'm covering online-related and social-networking related topics, but jumping around between GDC Mobile, Serious Games, Worlds In Motion summit, Independent Games, and the Game Design, Production, and Business tracks. http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/02/20/liveblogging-gdc-2008/ Summary EDIT: Slides + voiceover on Adrian's site now - freetoplay.biz A good introduction to people wanting to start paying attention to what's been happening in MMO industry for the last 5 years. Didn't delve into the recent changes in the last 1-2 years, more dwelling on the fact that the last ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/02/19/gdc08-the-power-of-free-to-play-adrian-crook/ Sometimes, it's the little things you do that get noticed Last year I would have ranted about how retarded it is that game data is either entirely inaccessible to the web, or only accessible to an “official” website. ...This year, however, is all about the positive. Rather than rant about no ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/01/22/game-data-accessibility-and-xml-feeds/ After the success of the totally unofficial and informal meetup at AGDC, I thought I'd ask around if anyone wants to do another one of these at GDC... a couple of us are going to get together and chat about the head-on-collision between games and Web 2.0. Come along and see if ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/01/17/gdc08-web-20-games-meetup/ "In reality, one size has never fit all, but when players didn't have so many choices, they had to put up with it. Now they don't. No longer can publishers rely on retailing strategies designed to make money by forcing players to buy what the publishers want them to buy, ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/12/27/what-web-20-means-for-the-games-industry/ Too busy to write at the moment (if I weren't, I'd be working on followups to the entity systems posts). So, in the meantime, go listen to the ever-brilliant Lawrence Lessig. I've just been listening to his 2006 talk on Free Culture. There are too many memorable, insightful, or funny elements ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/12/19/nothing-to-see-here-unless-you-care-about-culture/ Sulka Haro's keynote at AGDC07. What happens when a Lead Designer gets heckled, and things turn nasty... (no, not really, but the digital photos from the official photographer were seriously amateurish, so I thought I'd have some fun. The ones of me make me look far worse :)) "WHAT?!? Why would you ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/09/27/sulka-gets-angry/ "Often wrong, never in doubt" is the tagline on Marc Andreessen's blog. With a recent post of his, on the "three kinds of platforms you meet on the internet", I think the first part of that tagline is ringing true :P - Marc is talking nonsense with his claims that ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/09/27/internet-as-platform-marc-andreessen-is-wrong/ The informal meetup for Web 2.0 and Games at AGDC turned out a lot more popular than I'd expected. Looks like we need to make this an official thing next time: Over the course of a few hours, we had somewhere between 15 and 30 people turn up, and eventually got ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/09/11/agdc-2007-report-for-web-20-games-meetup/ UPDATE: short, complete, 42-slide version now available from the CMP website - https://www.cmpevents.com/sessions/GD/S5762i1.ppt ...but if you want the 144-slide version (!), see below. No extra content. Caching for Web 2.0 - How and Why - NB: these slides are the actual ones I used at the talk, which won't make so much ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/09/10/austin-gdc-talk-caching-for-web-20/ Inteviewed for RPG Vault's latest Online Worlds Roundtable - http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/817/817490p3.html "Web 2.0 businesses compete directly with the games industry on multiple levels, and anyone who doesn't spot that and act accordingly will suffer. If your game doesn't embrace - or deliberately and carefully reject - Web 2.0, you'll that your users ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/09/10/rpg-vault-online-worlds-roundtable-15/ The entire switch here is to think of these websites not as collections of features or products, but rather manufactured experiences that are designed to be compelling wastes of peoples' time ;-) -- Andrew Chen http://andrewchen.typepad.com/andrew_chens_blog/2007/08/reward-schedule.html http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/09/03/the-secret-to-making-successful-web-20-startups/ I'm talking at Austin GDC on "Caching for Web 2.0", and I'll be having a small dig at the games industry and the obsession some people have with "game 1.0/2.0/3.0" on the side, but I'd really like to meet up with anyone interested in how best we can capitalize on ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/08/26/agdc-2007-web-20-games-meetup/ This question keeps coming up, and most people just need a simple answer. This is the quick and dirty explanation I came up with for some colleagues with the added emphasis on concrete benefits rather than just theoretical ideas. What is Web 2.0? "Web 2.0 was the moment we stopped using computers ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/07/08/what-is-web-20/