Toluu

Thoughts on Moroagh - MMORPGs and other distractions

MMOs and stuff really

What makes raiding fun?June 20 2008

I was just about trying to research what possible reasons where why prominent and successful World of Warcraft raiding groups disbanded, such as Death & Taxes (disbanded), Risen (disbanded), Nightmares Asylum (moved to Age of Conan), Flying Hellfish (moved to Age of Conan). But there are more movements too. On my backwater server the server first raid group disbanded with the core leadership joining a top 10 group.

But rather than actually execute the program of trying to understand what happened there, leave the obvious comments such as AoC came around, or that the wait was too long, or that the stepping up from the Black Temple to Sunwell was too much even for the hardcore, or that it’s just been a long long run with WoW, I’d instead like to pull up a quote of a Death and Taxes member after they disbanded, posted on the WoW official forum:

I miss 40 man raids.

Being social with 40 people > “feeling more important in a smaller group”

Thanks

Social and Family Gaming #4a: Prelude to CoopMay 26 2008

Well I was busy, and I still am. So in the meantime just a quick teaser on the next topic on social gaming I wanted to write about: cooperative games! As the teaser I wanted to link up a brief blurb that Michael Fitch wrote a few years ago trying to argue why cooperative modes are harder to make than one might think.

Well it goes in hand with why some game devs have argued that competitive modes are easy to design. One offloads all AI concerns onto a non-artificial intelligence. But that not the topic.

Certainly fact is that there are loads of games that are either solo or competitive but one has to look to find your favorite coop game. There is a horribly incomplete list of coop games on wikipedia, but even if it was more complete the list is way shorter than what is published or what has competitive modes. As for interesting coop games over time and some guesstimations why these are rarer than others will have to wait until I have more time again.

Social and Family Gaming #3: Fun and being socialMarch 5 2008

I’m not going to try to carve out a whole theory here, but rather I want to try, by critique to point at the open spots for social and family gaming. Really for all I know the psychology of fun is understudied. One can open recent textbooks on social, personality and developmental psychology and not find the words “fun” “enjoyment” in the index or as topic (if you know good texts that do, ones with actually are based on sensibly controlled experiments that is). Luckily serious psychology books are at the same time full of results about social behavior, benefits from having friends etc. We even have results that for many internet and computer game users, the social plays a very important factor.

It’s sort of common wisdom that games are about fun, maybe we call activities games because we do attribute to them fun in some way or another.

The reason why this is so interesting is because what is “fun” or perceived as being fun, defines game design. Certainly there are different views on this around and I already mentioned Dani Bunten Berry in part #2. Her famous quite epitomizes that the social trumps individual achievement and solitude in her mind.

Game designers like Raph Koster talk about fun, and he refers to a model that he credits to Nicole Lazzaro that categorizes fun into 4 gr

NPD 2007 PC retail sales inJanuary 27 2008

NPD data for PC retail sales in 2007 is in (via Gamasutra). It shows only WoW and WoW TBC as MMO retail box top sellers. All other titles in the top ten are offline titles. Sims2 and it’s expansions are still going strong again.

Retail box sales are down again after a 1% recovery in 2006.

None of the titles I enjoyed, like BioShock, Witcher, or even LotRO made top 10, but the first two came out mid-year and Witcher for example just may have a bigger market in Europe than the US. 

Again this does not include digital download sales, and no alternative revenue models, subscription fees etc.

I really wonder how big the digital download segment is, given that for example both NCSoft (GuildWars etc) and Steam (Orange box titles etc) gear towards online sale of their titles once you have one of their games installed.

I really wonder when NPD will be able to give more direct market development estimates that include digital download sales, etc. I think they announced that they’d do that a few years ago but it clearly hasn’t happened so far.

Social and family gaming #2: History - How Dani Bunten Berry has said it all alreadyJanuary 24 2008

Well I am kind of sorry for the overly flashy title of this entry. But to be honest I am kind of sad how the gaming industry has developed with regards to social gaming.

Today one really has to look long and hard for game designs that put the social relating of gamers in the foreground. This is an odd critique because I’m sure many people will tell me that we are in the exploding age of “social games” which is “casual games” + “social networks” and surely a social network is nothing but social relating!

Well, yeah, but that’s not what I mean. I do cheer for these developments. But these developments happen kind of away from the mainstream gaming industry, or if they relate to the mainstream, are newly formed satellites to tapped a newly discovered market. Because “social games are exploding right now“, it’s 2008. But it is another reason to be said, because “social games” with another definition already made a kind of splash back in the 80s.

Dan Bunten aka Dani Bunten Berry is a very prominent figure in the history of game development. Surely loads of people know her, and if not loads know games of her. And there is a persistent thread through her work: social and multi-player gaming. 

I’ll be quoting or loosely refering to loads of sources. Most