Muckbeast

I’m at my daughter’s gymnastics facility. Her practice is 4 hours long, so I bring my laptop to get some work done.
The area that has a couple tables is adjacent to one of the smaller gyms where they have dance classes sometimes.
The teenagers that take the dance classes, as well as sometimes their moms, pile [...]

So I broke down and started playing a Facebook game recently. Not much has changed. The same lame tricks and the same lame forcing you to spam your friends into oblivion.
Please give this article a read, and let me know what you think.
Facebook Games: Where Monetization Gimicks and User Growth Matter More Than Good Game [...]

That is the question asked by Wolfshead, and he answers it in the affirmative. He makes a number of excellent arguments in his long and detailed post. I will summarize a few of the more salient points, and give my own answer to this question after the jump:

In a comment to my Bill Roper – Computer Game Poison? article, BryanM passed along a link to a recent Gamasutra interview of Bill Roper. As always, it is interesting simply because of how disingenuous and dishonest (or at least in denial) this guy is.
And maybe, also at that time, that’s just to where the [...]

A year and a half ago I blogged about Sleazy Marketing in the MMO Industry, and of course Evony was a major part of that post.
Today I learned about this really amusing parody “television commercial” for Evony. It is worth a watch:

When I linked my last blog post on Facebook, one of my friends (*waves to Carly McNamara*) reminded me that there was indeed a Norse-themed MMO in development a few years ago. As soon as I read that, I instantly remembered Mythica (largely because of the trademark infringement lawsuit between Microsoft, developers of Mythica, and [...]

In a recent issue of PC Gamer, Desslock wrote a column wherein the salient point was we should appreciate the bad animations in Fallout: New Vegas because the developers instead spent that time working on the content. I think that is a point well taken – especially for RPGs.
Why then is this same attitude not [...]

For a number of reasons, I will probably never play WoW again. I ended with Burning Crusade. But I still like to keep up with it, and hear about what has changed and what has not.
One of my writers recently wrote this article about the Carbonite Add On for WoW. The part that struck me [...]

I have no idea why they are dragging this out and pretending January 25, 2011 is when this goes live. Anyone who wants to can be in the “beta” of free to play. How in the heck there’s a beta for that I have no idea.
This F2P maneuver by CO is one of the most [...]

Congrats to Blizzard. They set a new sales record by selling 3.3 million copies of Cataclysm in the first 24 hours. That’s really great because I know those hard working, under-appreciated folks really needed the money…
But why just 3.3 million? I mean, if you play WoW, is it really an option whether or not you [...]

In one fell swoop Penny Arcade (possibly not deliberately) took a swipe at both dumbed down MMOs and the excessive amount of quests and quest grinding in the modern MMO.

Bill Roper is out at Cryptic Studios. Whether it was truly a departure due to his “entrepreneurial spirit” becoming “restless”, or Cryptic coming to their senses, we may not know for quite some time. If anyone knows an insider, a little bit of inside info would be very welcome.
Anyone who has played any game he [...]

Apparently, trashing Farmville was the trendy thing to do at the recent GDC (Game Developers Conference). The discussion and trashing have continued on various game developer blogs as well. The common arguments include: “these aren’t games”, “these games suck”, “this is a fad”, “these companies are scammers”, etc. The common fears include: “this is the [...]

This is an abbreviated version of the story designed to get some discussion going. For the full story, with all the details, read my article here: Wikipedia’s War on Gaming History and Threshold RPG .
1) Wikipedia is full of people gunning for an administrator promotion. In the current climate, the easiest path is getting articles [...]

Content creation is widely considered the most time consuming and costly area of MMO/MUD development. I agree with this. In graphical MUDs, you have animations, mob AI, scripting, zone design, and all the additional graphics and visual effects that go along with zones, powers, items, etc. These are very expensive. In text MUDs, you have [...]

I love MUDs, MMOs, virtual worlds, (insert your favorite term). I love making them. I love playing them. I love talking about them. I hate raiding. I hate the current obsessive focus on a MUD’s “end game.” There shouldn’t be an end game. The draw of open ended, online multiplayer worlds is that they don’t [...]