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> Games do not by definition, have a winning state and conversely a losing state. Many do, to be sure. You might want to read up on the philosophy of games a bit

I quite well aware of the history and philosophy of games for the past 200,000 years. No offense, but let me know when *you* have shipped a few games because you clearly don't seem to understand the difference between what makes something an amusement, puzzle, a toy, or a game. If you are relying on Wikipedia for authoritative definitions no wonder you are confused.

Now I agree there is a lot of overlap between "Entertainment", "Digital Arts" and "Games" but again unless you can *clearly* separate between all 4 (amusement, puzzle, toy, and game) you don't really understand the domain nor the definitions. You are basically arguing that something interactive or amusement is a game. So watching TV is now called game? /sarcasm Please.

Calling a toy a game doesn't make it so. That is like the media calling a programmer a hacker. They are of course related but two *separate* things.

Let's took a look at Will Wright, someone whose games have sold 100 million copies and generated more than $1 billion in sales.

"Spore gives users unprecedented freedom to bring their imaginations to some semblance of digital life. In that sense Spore is probably the coolest, most interesting toy I have ever experienced. But itâ(TM)s not a great game, and that is something quite different."

Why would its *creator* and *designer* call it a toy and not a [good] game, when the public does? Because he understands the *differences* between what makes something a toy and a game.

Other game designers say the same thing. Jonathan Blow creator of Braid had this said about him:

plans to do nothing less than establish the video game as an art form - a medium capable of producing something far richer and more meaningful than the brain-dead digital toys currently on offer.

Games have
* Rule(s)
* Goal(s)

If have no way of winning you have a toy.

References:
* http://www.income-outcome.com/blog/bid/29552/GAMES-vs-TOYS
* http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/10/will-wright-toys-stupid-fun-club.html
* http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/the-most-dangerous-gamer/8928/?single_page=true
* http://www.raphkoster.com/2012/03/13/x-isnt-a-game/
* http://gamasutra.com/view/feature/167418/what_makes_a_game.php
* http://gamasutra.com/view/feature/172587/a_way_to_better_games_.php

There's been a few very interesting takes on this really old (in terms of how long games have been a field with discussion) argument in the past few weeks:

My favorites:
http://www.raphkoster.com/2012/01/20/narrative-is-not-a-game-mechanic/
http://whatgamesare.com/2012/02/the-narrative-vs-mechanics-circus.html

My personal take? I'm a grad student working on procedural narrative, hacking the cognitive loop of story building players go through during play. So... I agree with Jaffe? It's really much more of a slider than a dichotomy. In fact...
http://whatgamesare.com/2011/12/the-four-lenses-of-game-making.html
It's a way more broad than even a single slider. I'm not even sure that Kelly's 2d graph comes close to the rich diversity of experience that can be created though video games.

This is an extremely interesting field of research. http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/meanies.shtml However, there are much more intelligent individuals who have discovered far more about it than this man. That blip from Koster doesn't say much, but what he does say actually makes sense. He's also written quite a bit more.

Playing the SWG beta, one aspect of the experience stood out. When attempting to travel from planet to planet, you had to sit at the shuttle station for up to 5 minutes.

I did a lot of resource gathering, so I spent most of my game time out in the wilderness. The shuttle stop ended up being the place where I was most likely to interact with other players. I later learned that this was by design.

http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/socialization.shtml
http://www.raphkoster.com/2005/12/09/forcing-interaction/

Playing the SWG beta, one aspect of the experience stood out. When attempting to travel from planet to planet, you had to sit at the shuttle station for up to 5 minutes.

I did a lot of resource gathering, so I spent most of my game time out in the wilderness. The shuttle stop ended up being the place where I was most likely to interact with other players. I later learned that this was by design.

http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/socialization.shtml
http://www.raphkoster.com/2005/12/09/forcing-interaction/

COPA, CIPA, COPPA, etc.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39748-2002May31?language=printer http://www.raphkoster.com/2008/07/23/child-online-protection-act-overturned/

Why did Sony/BMG really pay money?

E P.S.Sony/BMG when you send me your cute litle notes, do it on letterhead with a real signature. Automated PGP sigs have no validity.

Every time I see someone post this, it saddens me -- Communities.com (the folks that own the domain now are completely unrelated) aka Electric Communities built a secure, distributed virtual world (under the names ECHabitats/Microcosm), in the mid-to-late nineties. Most people didn't get it.

It's obvious that, having seen Second Life, people are starting to understand -- "Hey, having things on centralized servers kind of sucks. I want to run my own 'sim', and be able to connect it to other peoples'"

There are few traces of the project left on the 'net -- a few mentions in Koster's MUD history timeline and a few entries in the internet archive...

Hopefully someone will pick up the idea and run with it one of these days.

What part of "The lacking playtime was mentioned in pretty much all reviews." did you not understand? Maybe it took you 7 hours to finish the game. Maybe it took you 10 hours. It doesn't really matter; it's still too short a game.

Again, people buy Halo 3 for the online component. If your girlfriend's brother bought the game for the single-player mode, whether the game is long enough or not is his judgment to make. It would be too short for me. The fact that Halo 3 has a short single-player mode in no way helps your argument that HS was long enough.

One, it's not silly. Two, you're right. That's what I said all along: I wanted an innovative platformer. Instead, I got a boring old shooter with PS2 gameplay mechanics.

And R&C isn't a platformer to begin with. It's a shooter.

Have you even played Mario 64? The game is entirely open. You enter a level, and you're free to go wherever you want. The whole level is open to you. There's no comparison to something like R&C, where you follow a narrow path. None at all.

I'm not sure if you're lying or if you're not remembering this correctly. Here's a link to an article about the study. To quote:

"Heavy gamers make up only 3% of the gaming population"

Obviously each "heavy gamer" buys way more games than the other market segments, but even taking this into account, heavy gamers are a small part of the market in terms of total money spent.

Too bad for your sister, but the Wii's attach rate suggests that most casual gamers will buy quite a bunch of games.

You may also be interested in the mud-dev mailing list. Schubert and others contributed to the original list, the archives of which are available from Raph Koster's site

The archives cover a lot of interesting ideas that largely have yet to find their ways into mainstream MMOs.

One of my personal favorites was genmud, which featured a completely procedurally generated world, in which NPC populations battle each other for survival. By contrast, modern MMOs generally still use static "spawn points" to determine where new creatures enter the game world, which are usually inserted by hand by developers/level designers.

Spot on. The 'Hardcore' are the people who thrive in solitary experiences. Most people in the world enjoy hanging out with other people and want 'playing computer games' to be like childhood play: with other people.

Raph Koster said it in 2006: http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/02/10/are-single-pl ayer-games-doomed/

Single-player gaming is an aberration, a blip: http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/02/10/are-single-pl ayer-games-doomed/ Everything we do has a social/multiplayer context.

Sony did a white paper on the Station Exchange economy which noted that the largest sellers were 22-year-olds (who have plenty of time but not a lot of money) and the largest buyers were age 34. These older players have more money than time, and that fact drives the demand side of the virtual economy, creating a sustainable market for both power-leveling and game accounts.

Now, one thing I've learned about MMORPGs like World of Warcraft & Ultima Online is that the client needs to be protected.

While I appreciate your cheerleading (Always been a fan of WoD), you're wrong.

http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/04/12/interesting-s ales-figures/

Like a lot of slashdotters I've quit WoW to salvage my real life. For the last few months I've been busy downloading and trying a variety of mmogs trying to find some methadone. These articles show there's a lot of folk out there trying to cater to my needs! I like that a lot (because I haven't figured out what my needs are yet). Damion Schubert's Moving Beyond Men in Tights talk has some nice ideas, "You don't need fantasy but you need an inviting world. People want to spend their spare time here. This is their corner bar. Even the bad guys in WoW are cute and funny." It's because of this idea that I've settled on Puzzle Pirates while I'm waiting for the next great mmog.

Here, I made a copy of the summary in case the slashdot gets servered :)

This year's AGC is now at an end, and several sites have coverage of the last day's events. The hit event for the day seemed to be Damion Schubert's Moving Beyond Men in Tights talk. MMORPG.com has a slew of interesting articles, covering Emerging PR Strategies for MMOGs, Running Your Own MMOG, and Rich Vogel on MMOG Betas. Raph has a liveblog on a session about Virtual Economies, and finally the 3pointD site has a look at a panel on Virtual Worlds. Interesting stuff. From the 'Men in Tights' writeup:
"The queston to answer, why do we keep making grindtastic classbased combat oriented men in tights gamey games? I'm not going to answer 'because it sells' because it's a circular argument and a copout. We won't get anywhere if we only do what was done before. Instead, I'll ask why do we need a grind, why do games appear to be winning, why are classes good, and so on. The reason to tackle this is because whenever people decide to make a new game, these are often the first five things people choose to innovate on. But there's a lot of bad innovation from people trying to solve these five problems."

Here, I made a copy of the summary in case the slashdot gets servered :)

This year's AGC is now at an end, and several sites have coverage of the last day's events. The hit event for the day seemed to be Damion Schubert's Moving Beyond Men in Tights talk. MMORPG.com has a slew of interesting articles, covering Emerging PR Strategies for MMOGs, Running Your Own MMOG, and Rich Vogel on MMOG Betas. Raph has a liveblog on a session about Virtual Economies, and finally the 3pointD site has a look at a panel on Virtual Worlds. Interesting stuff. From the 'Men in Tights' writeup:
"The queston to answer, why do we keep making grindtastic classbased combat oriented men in tights gamey games? I'm not going to answer 'because it sells' because it's a circular argument and a copout. We won't get anywhere if we only do what was done before. Instead, I'll ask why do we need a grind, why do games appear to be winning, why are classes good, and so on. The reason to tackle this is because whenever people decide to make a new game, these are often the first five things people choose to innovate on. But there's a lot of bad innovation from people trying to solve these five problems."

Note: Raph Koster wasn't really involved with SWG from October 2003 on. Essentially after release, he wasn't really part of the team that screwed SWG up.

Plenty of things went wrong with SWG. Such as, released too early, in beta there are a ton of things you can change, that you can't change after release, take combat for example. The other thing is lots of game systems were rushed or cut, just to meet the release deadline(release deadlines don't work for MMOs, you are making a game that should be used for years onwards by at least a hundred thousand users). The skill system was not the ideal one that Raph had in mind, he said the first guy that worked on the skill system left the company the second guy had no idea how to do it, and by then Raph said he would do it the way he wanted, but they ran out of time, so they it the way it was, "the onion" skill system. The way it was supposed to be, was like you take up some scout skills, and some marksmen skills, and soundly, you have a title of sniper, and with that gain some minor abilities. And the way this system worked, is players may take branches that didn't give them any title, but the devs could always add that later on quite easily, they may see players take dancing and hand to hand fighting, and they could add a special title there for those that did that, with some minor abilities and stats added.

http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/07/19/community-bui lding/#comments is an article where he talks about such things and responds to comments.

And just a note, what he did, was made a game people love. Its been well over 9 months since the NGE, and people are still calling out for the "pre-CU" game of SWG on the SWG forums, and other forums themselves. To me, that screams that they had a loyal community and SOE abandoned them on the roadside.

The only time I remember being able to solo anything was during the buffs and comp armor debacle. One of the darkest times in SWG, essentially you needed buffs just to put on comp armor, and buffs were so strong, you could solo almost any MOB in the game and never die because you regened health too fast. Although the recent CU and NGE, I heard you could solo a ton then too even though buffs were essentially removed. This is not what SWG was meant to be, but this is the direction it was pulled into,

AI in almost all MMOs are notoriously weak, and some did require special tactics, those tactics mostly being, the MOB had high resists to some types of damage, so you had to use other types of damage to actually damage him. As a rifleman I was limited in my damage types, but when I did damage I really could pound it out.

He was also responsible for Pre-Trammel UO, and I still hear people talk about that game. So yes this man deserves an article.

Sure, mass numbers of Windows users MIGHT defect to the Macintosh and OS X. They might also just defect to Linux, which runs on the hardware they already have. That seems more likely to me. Realistically, though, Windows users aren't about to move to the Mac in any great numbers. There are lots of reasons.

Already here in the comments, Mac users have boasted about Macs giving you more for the money. Shortly after the MacBook Pro was announced, I published this article showing that the Apple laptop offered little or nothing over a comparable Dell, HP, or Acer laptop. Then a bit later on, I wrote another. Again, Apple has little to offer. I'm not the only one who thinks so.

As for resale value, it's no surprise that a Mac retains more of its value. Faced with paying $2,500 for a new Macintosh with marginal speed improvements over the previous generation unit decked out for $1,800 I would imagine many users on tight budgets would opt for the older unit. Or they might look at a brand new Dell machine running Windows for $600-1000. As noted by other writers here, if Apple had to compete with some other brand on equivalent Mac hardware, their resale prices would change accordingly.

Performance is important to many computer users, especially most Windows users I know. This is one thing that will keep the masses from moving to the Macintosh. OS X can't outperform Linux on the same hardware, doing the same tasks with the same software. OS X can't outperform Windows on the same or comparable hardware. OS X has lots of little hidden performance problems just waiting to be found.

Consistency is also important to many computer users. It's not uncommon for a major Service Pack for Windows to break something, but it rarely breaks anything major. It is, however, extremely common for even minor updates to Apple technology to break things. Just this week I found that the OS X 10.4.6 update broke a script we've used at login to set up home directories for network authenticated users. The same update on Intel-based iMacs broke the same script in a different way. I spent hours troubleshooting that, all for a minor update of dubious value. It took a slight change to how I installed the script and one command change to one line of the script, but finding those needed changes wasn't easy. This isn't the first time OS X has done this to me in the past year. Windows hasn't done this to me since Service Pack 2, and a quick update to the affected software fixed the only compatibility problem I had in seconds... not hours.

Gaming is important to many computer users. Most new commercial games are released on Windows first, and later (if ever) to the Macintosh. Now that Apple has offered "Boot Camp" as an option, it has been suggested that Mac-specific gaming might be dead soon. Why create a Mac-compatible game when you can release just a Windows version and tell Mac users to run that on their Intel-based Mac? Sure, you'll always have little Mac boutique companies putting out Mac-only or Mac-first games, but the Electronic Arts' of the world likely drop any Mac support quickly.

Build quality is also important. Where I work, we get hundreds of new Dells in per year and a handful of new Macs. In 2005, we got in 6 Macs. 3 of them were dead out of the box. 1 had to be taken completely apart and replaced piece by piece for the tech to figure out that the power cable had been crushed into the motherboard at the factory, shorting out the system and preventing it from booting. In about 400 Dell systems (desktops and laptops) we received

So, by now people have seen the news. Yes, it is true I am leaving SOE.

Why? Well, I've been here for gosh, almost six years maybe? It's been a good ride, and I think we've gotten to do some really fun and interesting work. But I am getting interested in doing some stuff that is a bit off the beaten path -- really, anyone who has been reading the blog can see that! -- and while SOE feels it's really cool stuff, it's just not where they are at right now. My contract was up, and it was the right time to poke my head up and look around, that sort of thing. It's all quite friendly, and actually, I hope that I'll work with SOE again in the future, because there's a lot of wonderful talent here and a lot of cool technology, and a lot of friends.

So, sometime soon here I'll be off on my own. Nope, no announcements about plans or anything. I don't have a new studio in my back pocket, I don't have a job lined up, any of that. And... we'll see what comes. I'm thinking sleeping in next week sounds good.

Oh -- the old email still works, for now. You can always post a comment or use the email addy at the bottom of this page to reach me, too.

All sort of anti-climactic, huh? ;)

Personally, I think he is one talented individual who would absolutely shine in a less, shall we say, strangling environment? GL Raph!

/K

Raph Koster outlines in his presentation titled Moore's Wall how, right now, the growing power of computers is making games prohibitively expensive to produce. As the power of the machine grows, there is pressure to utitlize the new power to improve on the presentation (mainly, the graphics) of the game, which makes the game a lot more costly produce without adding much in terms of gameplay, and usually resulting in a reduction in the amount of actual game content.

One way to break this trend is to utilize the increasing CPU power of PCs to procedurally generate content, or to assist the player in creating his their own content. Of course, our procedural algorithims and software have to improve a lot if it's going to be an important supplement (let alone replacement) to the traditional way of doing things, which is to have professional artists hand-craft everything.

In this regard, Spore looks to be a huge step in the right direction. We need more projects like Spore to mature the technology. The fact that EA seems to be recognizing Wil's genious and throwing their support behind his project is a good thing, if the suits at top see the promise of this kind of approach, it can only mean good things for the industry. EA was not exactly in love with the idea of The Sims before it was proven an unmitigated success, despite the fact that Will was already an acclaimed game designer well before that game's release. So, even if EA isn't entirely turning over a new leaf, at least they're trusting their golden boy enough to say that they're pinning their hopes on his newest experimental idea.

I agree, in a way. This is why I find the Station Exchange somewhat offensive. What's Sony's solution to their poor game design that makes progress a slow, boring, repetitive grind? Have people to pay them more money to mitigate the unpleasant aspects of the game resulting from their design failures, of course. Maybe I'm just jealous that I haven't figured out a way to earn money from my deficiencies, though.

However, I don't think it's ever going to be possible to create a persistent world where the amount of time you put into the game isn't somehow significantly rewarded. What is needed is a way for players to feel as if they are always making steady progress, even if they only play a few hours per week, in 15-90 minute game sessions (oh, and these sessions should be fun), without quickly exhausting all of the game's content. Should it really matter if you never hit the level cap, or catch up to the high school kids, as long as it doesn't seem to take gross lengths of time to gain cool new skills and see interesting new areas?

Another approach would be a deemphasis on progression altogether, in favor of a setting that is more focused on providing "sandbox" styles of gameplay, or player vs. player activity, etc.

EVE Online - while I only played it shortly - appears to have one big part of the problem solved: Skills increase through automatic training that depends on only one factor: Real time passed. Whether you're online playing or offline sleeping/working/whatever doesn't matter. You gain x experience points per hour.

Which to me doesn't appear to do much beyond give those who have been playing the game longer (real time instead of play time) an insurmountable lead and exclusive access to certain abilities (or at least, exclusive access to a variety of abilities). Someone who opens a subscription today can never hope to achieve an avatar as skillful as someone who's been playing from day one, no matter how clever and skilled they might be as a player (correct me if I'm wrong here though, my EVE playtime was also very limited).

And there's still plenty of mind-numbing grinding to do in EVE if you want to progress, in the form of mining asteroids or whatever. Though EVE does support a thriving player driven economy from what I've seen, one that the enterprising, clever or devious player can take advantage of to get rich much more quickly than one could achieve merely from grinding asteroids or NPC pirates for ISK.

I do see EVE as a positive step in the right direction, because the players have a larger degree of control over the shape of the world, they can create their own challenges for themselves to keep the game interesting, without necessarily requiring the devs to release new content. Or at least, so it seems. Like I said, I haven't played the game a whole lot myself.

A good game should reward good playing, not more playing.

I agree, I would like to see more games that reward skill rather than playtime, but how to accomplish this? If it's a persistent world, then inevitably those who have more time to play not only spend more time honing their skills and are more likely to become a better player, but spend more time reaping the rewards of successful play, gaining mechanical advantages in the form of their avatar gaining more skill, better equipment, more privledges, etc.

The only way I can see to reward skill over time is to make it easy to lose progress you've made as a result of your failures. There are already games like this, but they are niche games, not massively popular ones like World of Warcraft.

Raph Koster put it this way, "... is there necessarily something wrong with giving people without significant skill (which is

You are working on the assumption that the game world is inhabited entirely by morons who will not work out the mechanics. Whether or not the numbers are displayed to the player they will work out what the underlying mechanics are. All the numbers do is save them that hassle.

No matter what you do, players will decode every formula, statistic, and algorithm in your world via experimentation.