It's a whole day of stuff, which would produce reams and reams of screen estate, not to mention wear my fingers to nubs. Can't type with nubs!
Doug: The killer app for most MMOGs is people. If you ask people why they still stick around in a dying MMOG, naming no names, they’ll always say “their friends”. They stick around to play with their friends despite the quality of the game. During downtime of content creation, say during an expansion development period when game designers aren’t putting out much new content, players will create their own content. You’ll see really serious guild drama. We saw guilds explode when there was no new content, because they had nothing better to do. Developers need to pay attention to this.
Later:
Doug: Our project [link] was born out of an anecdote that starts with a game of SWG. We wanted to see if the Europeans played differently, and well, it turns out they're all playing Imperial and we are all Rebel, but that's a whole other story.. and we asked them whether they played with Americans ever. And they said yes, and that “they weren’t as bad as we thought they would be”. Gradually we’re starting to see that there’s a change in attitude toward Americans through the process of play. The more Europeans played with Americans, the more well they thought of America.
MMOGs, like Soylent Green, is people?
--MMOGs, like Soylent Green, is people?
Dang right it is. It surely ain't the gameplay. MMOs are designed as RPGs, but are RPGs where one can't interact with the world very deeply or meaningfully, and are fairly linear. RPGs are based on the idea that the player can (and will) change the world; MMOs like WoW are built around the constraint that players can't affect *any* sort of change at all... In other words, without the value added by other players, most MMOs are just *bad* RPGs.
Posted by: bob | March 21, 2006 at 17:41
Ahem, I believe the correct pronunciation is "Peeeeooople!"
Posted by: Aluvius | March 21, 2006 at 19:19