Tattered Page

I have another favorite quote from Secondhand Lions (my other one can be found here).  It’s a great tale of coming of age, adventure, growing old, and, important for here, adventure.  When Hub McCann (brought to life by Robert Duvall) is confronted by an overconfident troublemaker, hub replies:  

I’m Hub McCann. I’ve fought in two World Wars and countless smaller ones on three continents. I led thousands of men into battle with everything from horses and swords to artillery and tanks. I’ve seen the headwaters of the Nile, and tribes of natives no white man had ever seen before. I’ve won and lost a dozen fortunes, killed many men and loved only one woman with a passion a flea like you could never begin to understand. That’s who I am. Now, go home, boy!

Text really doesn’t do this justice. see the movie.

So, what does this have to do with gaming?  

(more…)

Well, I was intrigued when I heard hint of Ed Castronova’s MMO plans at the GLS conference.  Now my interest has been ramped up yet another notch.

It’s not that Arden: The world of Shakespeare will be themed in Shakespearian lore.  It’s not that it’ll be as much a learning environment for both developers and players.  I’d hoped as much.

Raph suggests that it’ll be using the Multiverse toolset, using it to experiment in ways I’d always hoped (the petri dish) and challenging some of the fantasy MMO staples that I’ve wanted to see challenged.

(more…)

Timothy Burke’s remarks regarding the value of forums got me thinking about the LACK of tools to expedite forum datamining. I’m more familiar with phpbb and other open, well-supported forum tools, but I couldn’t find many tangible tools browsing the sites for Lithium (used by SOE) and UBB.threads (common with NCSoft’s)

Some things can be done without specialized tools.

• Identify a few good community members with reasonable communication skills and make bookmarks to the player search for each one. Follow them. They can be your “pulse” on the community
• Most boards have the capability of tracking “hot topics.” See where the action is.

Neither solution is optimal.  You could have tools that help you identify these community leaders- or rate users privately… something to make identifying key members in a less static or arbitrary manner. Hot topics are often cluttered with faddish forum games or quirky sidenotes. Heuristic analysis is nonexistent.

Even when a hot topic is identified, determining its relevance is a bit tough. Posters can be convinced rather quickly that an issue is big enough to merit a response- and that their point of view is the dominant one. Even devs can fall for this false sense of “urgency.”

City of Heroes had a rather decent flareup a few months back, and I took some time to tinker with a text parser to get a more detailed look.  My results follow the break.

(more…)

Timothy Burke has a good writeup over at TerraNova addressing the apparent developer disdain for official forums.  Great points, but I think (or at least hope) that he’s mixing up the PUBLIC expressions of the developers with the REAL attitudes devs take from them.

(more…)

Jenn’s been playing Okami since its release a few weeks ago.  Although I haven’t been at the controls much myself (I can’t wrest the controls off of her) the game is impressive on many levels- right now, I want to talk about the graphics.

 

(more…)

Ah, the moment has arrived- that magical moment when you no longer get the excitement from a new post from a “you’ve got comments” announcement.  In its place, annoyance at “just another piece of spam.

Guess it’s time to boost up the spam defenses.  Things to look at

• I prefer keeping older topics open for comments, but they tend to be the targets of most steath-spambots.
• Registering users- I’d prefer NOT TO add any more barriers to new visitors.
• More wordpress additions- anyone have suggestions?
• Ben Zeigler’s been playing with a captcha over at his blog.  It seemed unobtrusive enough, though it’s a bit frustrating when you have a rather long message rejected and lost thanks to a garbled captchya (yes, I apparently failed that Turing test a few times)

So, while I mull over what takes more time: cleaning up the spam or blocking it, anyone have any suggestions?

My brother-in-law is a gamer.  He has consoles; an incredible print library , and a wide range of PC titles constantly at hand.  There is no way he could be mistaken as a non-gamer… except for his PC’s hardware.  The man’s main machine barely cracks half a gigahertz & his video card expenses make me envious.

I used to think “eh, he’ll come around and get a real machine” but now I’m wondering whether video-card elitism has caused me to ignore another entire realm of gaming.

The man continues to find new, engaging, low-system-requirements games that I never would have even considered.

His latest discovery is Monstergame.

(more…)

I’m not ashamed to promote something I have a blast playing.

Cryptic / NCSoft released a new boxed set containing both City of Heroes & City of Villains. They call it the “Good vs Evil Edition.” If you’re undecided on getting it, go over to MMORPG.com and get the FREE TRIAL.

(more…)

In Zen of Design’s post about the Cryptic-Marvel team-up, Aaron and I had a nice debate on story in City of Heroes and whether Cryptic can do well with Marvel’s material. We’ve since moved the debate to our own blogs. Aaron has expressed some concern that Cryptic’s characters don’t have the depth, but read it for yourself. It’s good stuff- even if I disagree.

Aaron is right in one aspect. Although I believe Cryptic advanced the MMO storywriting skills by leaps and bounds, nobody’s going to mistake any MMO’s story for award-winning literature.

He just gives Marvel too much credit- and Cryptic too little.

(more…)