My friend and fellow raid leader, Greg, posts that he is looking for alternatives to WoW and is trying to figure out what sorts of questions to ask in his exploration.  There are some obvious ones of course: Price structure, initial cost of ownership, playerbase, etc… but many of the questions will first come down to what the pre-suppositions that you bring to the table are.

Why do you play?  What are your primary motivators?  Are you a collector?  Explorer?  Socialite?  Competitor?  I think most of us who play MMOs probably engage in some of all these behaviors (and others) but there are always primary driving influences that cause us to spend more time and energy on them than others, and also those which deliver higher internal reward pay-offs than others.  It’s different for each person.

For myself, the first two questions I ask when exploring any persistent online world are these:

1. What is the environment like? ie: Is it open, explorable, immersive, realistic, fantastic?  What are it’s characteristics?
2. What kind of storyline elements are included?

The reason for these two questions go back to my primary motivators – I enjoy exploring.  I like exploring a richly developed world that doesn’t break my suspension of disbelief with awkward transitions or mechanics but lets me indulge my innate curiosity.  Likewise my storyline interests tend in the same way: I want to know what has happened in the past and what comes next and be able to explore the story at my own pace without having my immersion constantly broken by weighty mechanics concerns.

So the first question, Greg, is what are your motivators?

This presentation by Paul Adams, Google’s User Experience Research lead, is a fascinating examination of how we as human beings interact both on and offline, and how current social networking technology is and isn’t responding to our natural human patterns of use.  The setup may be a little long and turn you off (its a 216 slide presentation all told) – but the real meat of the talk starts at around slide 46 and goes until around slide 145 when he moves into Privacy Issues (interesting in light of recent conversations about RealID) and Influentials.

A few highlites:  People tend to have between 4-6 groups of friends.  Each group has 2-10 people in it, and the groups are formed around life stages and shared experiences.  The average American has just 4 strongly tied relationships and about 10 people they meet and speak with weekly.

Check out the whole thing to get an idea not only of how we interact with each other IRL and Online, but also to see how the industry is looking to respond to those interactions and leverage them for business use.

Blessed Internet, how I love your devious, twisted powers. I’m sure many folks have already seen the O’Rielly meltdown footage from his old days at Inside Edition (I had completely forgotten he worked that gig until I saw it!) Well thanks to the awesome distributive power of the Web and the hilarious creativity of some already anonymous and forgotten individual we now have a video that I probably shouldn’t laugh so much at – but I just couldn’t help myself. It got funnier each time I re-loaded it.

Please observe this, your official Content Warning. I for one am very glad I didn’t come across this link at work.

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One of the things which I most appreciate and enjoy about our team on the Starsiege 2845 project is how aware our leadership, and indeed most of our members, are of the great fallacies and dysfunctions at work in the games industry today. The elaborate waste, ingrained stupidity, bureaucratic nonsense, dreadful mismanagement, IP dilution, employee abuse, poor production values, and lousy QA policies – none of these unfortunate realities are lost on our team. As fans and artists we’ve watched with dismay as the industry has accepted a string of worst practices as a priori assumptions of the game development process.

Therefore it comes as no surprise to any of us to read this account from an EA widow who is having to cope with the human cost exacted on her husband by the publishing giant. They are in effect emptying him out of all his energy, talent, and love for the art of making games and are willing to planning on discarding him like a wasted prophylactic product when they have sucked every last useful drop of effort from him they can manage. Witness the status-quo for too much of the gaming industry:

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History never seems to happen quite so fast as our progressive pundits predict that it will, nor as fast as we would seem to like it to. Nevertheless it does happen. Paradigms are abolished in favor of new orders, industries rise and fall, governments do change and in retrospect we can often look back call the developments speedy affairs. While they are in process though they tend to take forever happening and never come in quite the fashion we expected nor on the timetables presented us by the insightful analysts who hold forth on such subjects.

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It is really a very typical sort of encounter for me. I’ve quite gotten used to it. I am standing in a store aisle lusting after some new technological toy when the lady in the purple dress suit approaches me and asks, “Excuse me, Sir. Can you help me?” It used to bother me, but I’ve worked retail in one form or another for a substantial period of my life and I’ve learned why it happens and come to terms with it.

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