…according to Ed Castranova’s snippet that Scott J posted from the MDY vs Blizzard trial notes. Courtesy of Scott, here’s a hosted copy of the source documents. Ed writes a nice little explanation of why / how bots damage an in-game economy. I liked that. Good stuff – go read […]
massively multiplayer
56 posts
Massively Multiplayer Entity Systems: Introduction So, what’s the connection between ES and MMO, that I’ve so tantalisingly been dangling in the title of the last three posts? (start here if you haven’t read them yet). The short answer is: it’s all about data. And data is a lot harder than […]
Summary Speakers: Daniel James, Three Rings; Matt Mihaly, Iron Realms Entertainment Very brief notes…
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 […]
Summary Speaker: Shannon Posniewski, Cryptic I was expecting something shockingly naive and/or stupid from the title of the session. The first thing the speaker said was that the title was completely wrong, so I ran with that. With that out of the way, the talk was fine, although small things […]
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, […]
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.
Summary Speaker: Jeffrey Steefel, Turbine IMHO, Jeffrey hereby strengthens the weight of evidence that Turbine is genuinely turning the corner from making poorly-guided foolish games to doing cutting-edge stuff and doing it well. Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO) has gone some considerable way to burying the failings of Asheron’s […]
Summary Speaker: Peter Marx, Analog Protocol/MTV Good to hear about virtual worlds and MMOs from the perspective of a mega content / media company. Several interesting ideas and explanations that are well worth reading if you haven’t already been tracking the way that Viacom et al have been approaching the […]
http://www.mmogchart.com/charts/ At long last, the new version of my charts and analysis is now online! I don’t have numbers for every game, but there are quite a few updates, most notably to World of Warcraft, RuneScape, Dofus, Tibia, and NCSoft’s various titles. Also included are preliminary numbers for Vanguard: Saga […]
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 […]
Also known as: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! (because I’m now deviating from the original schedule I outlined in Part 1; what the heck, it was only a rough agenda anyway…) Questions, questions… First of all, there’s a bunch of good questions that have been raised in response to the […]
Part 2 – What is an Entity System? (Part 1 is here) Sadly, there’s some disagreement about what exactly an Entity System (ES) is. For some people, it’s the same as a Component System (CS) and even Component-Oriented Programming (COP). For others, it means something substantially different. To keep things […]
Networked games use the internet, and the difficulties of making these games evolve on Internet Time, which means that the articles people wrote as recently as a year ago on how to make a networked or multiplayer game are already out of date. Most of the literature is more than […]
A few years ago, I wrote an article for Develop magazine – “10 MMOs you don’t want to do”. Here’s 8 things you really shouldn’t do but that might seem like a good idea if you’ve never made an MMOG before. All these are examples of things that have been […]
A few years ago, entity systems (or component systems) were a hot topic. In particular, Scott Bilas gave a great GDC talk (http://scottbilas.com/files/2002/gdc_san_jose/game_objects_slides.pdf – updated link thanks to @junkdogAP) on using them in the development of Dungeon Siege. The main advantages to entity systems were: No programmer required for designers […]