You’re absolutely right. The patterns that we published definitely have an ‘online community’ bent to them (rather than gaming, and when you think about what Yahoo! typically produces, it probably makes sense.) In fact, Josh Porter specifically asked me about Gaming-Vs.-SocialSoftware rep systems tho’ it didn’t make his final edit (I suspect because it was a long and lame answer) — I posted that response on my site: http://soldierant.net/archives/2008/06/the_bokardo_intervie.html

And, I hadn’t realized until I read this, but you’re right — the interview at least, and possibly the patterns themselves seem to imply that there’s value in honing in on ‘the one RIGHT’ pattern to employ, but I agree — sometimes the right pattern may be several, additive ones. (This was kind of implied in my praise for Yelp and their numerous ways to reward good review-writers, as ‘Funny’ or ‘Helpful’ or just ‘First to Review’.)

And I think we’d probably agree, too, on your assertion that it’s okay to use “all of them” (reputation types or patterns) in social gaming. Remember, because our focus is online communities (many of which are non-competitive in nature) we caution those designers to stay conservative. That was part of the impetus to also publish a ‘meta pattern’ (the Competitive Spectrum - http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/pattern.php?pattern=competitive ) … to remind community designers specifically that they’re NOT designing a game, and probably don’t have that lateral range of motion that a game designer would.

Great points all around - I especially enjoyed the “Why One is Never Enough” bullets… Looking forward to the next post on Kongregate! (Subscribing to your feed now…)

Some of the most useful aspects of Scrum I’ve found for pre-production are 2-week sprints with runnable (demonstrable) deliverables, daily stand-ups, and a feature backlog. We don’t use burn-down charts; I usually put the sprint goals on a whiteboard in the stand-up area and keep it updated continuously so anyone and everyone can see what we have completed and what needs to be done to meet our sprint goals.

Have you tried using Scrum? I’d be interested to know how you see this prototyping relating to Scrum. We do something very similar, a pre-pre-production :), to do ultra throw-away prototyping, but that was started before scrum, and integrating it into Scrum (getting prototypes to move from this incubation stage to a scrum pre-prod stage) is something I don’t fully understand.

Pre-production for large projects seems to be typically trending in the 12-24 month time frame. One of the largest factors I see as a distinction between pre-production and full production is the funding model, with the latter being almost exclusively publisher supplied, and the former between a combination of self-funding and investor driven.

I personnaly don’t play much games with great story . I only do multiplayer games. And i see a lot of things that are more important to the game fun (gameplay) that the story behind …
Like choice balance, progress path and rewards, level of mastery… , logic….
For me a good game is always about making choice, difficult choice…
between weapons, between path, betwean factions , between placement etc…