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How MMO Design Has Improved Bar Trivia
Polygon.com features a look at how (very) different computer game worlds can meet, in the form of game designer Ralph Koster's Kitchen Disasters-style rescue effort to revive a game quite unlike the ones he's famous for designing, like Ultima Online. Bar-trivia provider Buzztime has been putting electronic trivia games into bars for three decades -- and in that time, the number of options available to potential players has jumped. Bar trivia has crept into the domain of things like vinyl-based juke-boxes: not without appeal, but not exactly modern. Koster has tried to apply modern game design paradigms and objectives, and revamped the game:
Koster's Jackpot Trivia is now being introduced in a few hundred locations. Buzztime operates in around 4,000 bars and restaurants, but already the new addition has increased game usage by 15 percent.
Much of the improvements came from Koster's experiences of making and playing MMOs, and on the MMO's influence on all games. "These days, a lot of the qualities of MMOs are popping up on everything from social media to systems that sit outside and on top of games, like everything around Xbox Live and Steam," he says.
The re-vamp means, for Buzztime, better matching of opponents, as part of an overall redesign of incentives and risks: players have also gotten finer-grained control over their plays, by being able to assign weight to their answers: that means they can guess with less penalty when answers are tough, or take advantage of confidence in knowledge about a category in which they're strong.
So the game is attempting to find a balance that both trivia masters and compulsive gamblers can enjoy.
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I only have 15 million points, but I didn't play 9 month out of last year.
Buzztime really need to expand their question pool, and stop making 'France' the default answer to questions about Europe.
While I'm ranting, in Georgia, we don't care if there aren't any California bars playing the lunchtime games, give us back our 30 minute games starting at 1:30pm.
I agree. The other festering shitholes deserve a turn too: hothardware, startswithabang, technology trends...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The headline and the article say it's "MMO design" but the design described in the article seems to have nothing to do with MMOs. So this guy worked on a couple of really old MMOs (before or after Star Wars Galaxies destroyed itself in a redesign, I wonder?), and now is taking PVP balancing experience to a new field.
Except he's not trying to balance PVP so much as he is trying to level the playing field. It's an interesting bit of game design, I guess. It's too bad that whoever wrote the article clearly has no clue what they're talking about and has decided "MMO" will translate to page views. Which I guess worked since the otherwise entirely unremarkable story is here.
I have no idea what this has to do with MMOs. Not that it really matters, since MMOs are a dying genre. The last, and really only, great MMO remains World of Warcraft. Nothing has come close to replacing it, and there's no sign anything ever will. Yet it's losing players as people get bored with it, and those players end up just leaving the genre entirely. So it's just as well that he isn't really using MMO design, people have mostly decided MMOs just aren't a type of game that they're interested in.
Also, seriously, Slashdot, fix your broken related stories thing. You seem to have a bunch of non-tech related crap listed as "related articles."
Bar trivias work bestg when you're sitting with your friends around a table. No gadgets or anything.
8 rounds, 10 questions each, 8 sheets of paper.
bickerdyke
Its been so long since i saw a pinball table in a bar. All they have now are these stupid video game kiosks, golden tee & the punchem thing.
They are crazy with the amount they charge bars and restaurants, and they are losing out to other services deservedly based on that.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Having played it regularly for over 15 years, Buzztime's new methods have actually caused a decrease in the amount of people playing, and the game in question doesn't even appear to be played in the vast majority of their bars. They've been playing games with the numbers by touting their increase in players, when the "change" was they made it way harder for you to play without registering for an account.
That said, their Android tablets are a huge improvement over the previous "blue boxes" of death.
As someone else says above, the amount they charge bars is out of this world. They tried to do a "scaled payment plan", but it appeared to disappear at some point in their continued revolving door of executives.
Live trivia really is eating their lunch nowadays -- even Buffalo Wild Wings, Buzztime's largest customer, is getting into that pretty heavily.
Never allow real money into the game economy.
Make your money only through subscription / buying time.
EVE Online allows players to buy an item called a "pilot license extension" (PLEX) that's worth a month of play time but can also be traded for in-game items. Is that acceptable to you or not?