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 [...]

Apple has absolutely kicked ass in the last 5-10 years. iPod, iPhone, iPad, Macbook, and the last couple versions of MacOS. All huge hits and deservedly so.
Is it really so hard to just stop there? Is it really necessary to start giving Apple credit for things they don’t deserve any credit for?
Apparently for the media [...]

It used to be that when your birthday rolled around, it really meant something when someone remembered to give you a call or send you a card. It meant that person cared enough about you to remember your birthday and just acknowledge it. It was a small, simple thing but I believe many people considered [...]

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 [...]

Our car had to go in for routine service today, so we had a loaner car. No big deal, right? Well, the loaner car doesn’t have satellite radio (I guess I should say Sirius, but that’s the only game in town now anyway for satellite radio).
So I’m listening to regular radio in the car and [...]

I love articles like this: the ones that give you something to think and talk about. I wish we had more of them (though the guides and walkthroughs are obviously valuable to our readers on bright Hub).
Silencing the Critics Who Say Video Games Are Bad
Obviously, the crowd of folks likely to read this blog are [...]

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 [...]

… while counting their money?
I don’t expect every, or any, MMO to be a WoW killer. But it strikes me as a pretty dang sad indictment of the genre that time after time, big budget, major publisher MMOs come out and fail miserably.
Read on for examples that include Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, and Champions [...]

The ugly way Roper drove Hellgate: London and Flagship into bankruptcy is legendary. The greedy subscription model for an action RPG Diablo clone was an exceptionally bad idea. His constant arguing and fighting against respecs was rancid icing on the rotten cake.
In light of that, it was a real head scratcher when Cryptic hired him [...]

I want to revisit a favorite issue of mine. New Grind, Just like the Old Grind: Quest Heavy Advancement.
When people read that article, they often get the wrong idea. I don’t hate quests (or missions). I don’t think a 100% mob grinding game is the way to go. What I hate is when a game [...]

By now, many of you have read my article What Went Wrong with Warhammer Online? Is it a failure? Since I wrote the article, new leadership really has not done much to address those issues. In a recent interview, the head dev. of Warhammer put the blame for WAR’s problems on the game being too [...]

While often fodder for amusing videos and funny jokes, the way “noobs“ are derided in MMO culture is a very disturbing thing. While it is nothing new for insular hobbies or communities to be hesitant to embrace newcomers, MMO Elitism seems to take this to new levels. “Leet“ (or 3l33t, or elite) players take newbie [...]

I am really getting sick and tired of every MMO turning healers into pseudo-DPS classes. I don’t know who started this trend, but whoever it was needs to be chained up with the guy who invented bind on pickup crafted items, thrown into a pit, and have lotion lowered down to them while being reminded [...]

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 [...]

I had so much fun trashing raiding as it exists in current graphical MUDs over here, I might as well take another hack at it. I will explain how raiding as it is generally implemented in graphical MMOs provides a false, deceptive, and personally damaging sense of accomplishment.
False Sense of Accomplishment from Raiding
One of [...]

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 [...]