Archives for culture category
Filed under: Culture, Game mechanics, Opinion, Academic, Virtual worlds
One of the major problems of a game in which you can do anything is that… well, there’s not necessarily much of a reason to do anything. That’s a Terrible Idea recently had an interesting piece on the difficulty of generating goals and objectives in MMOs, especially in contrast with single-player games where your goals are equally pre-generated. The difference, as the article notes, is that single-player games have individual characters with a large impact on the game world. There’s no issue of making quests compatible with a wide variety of characters of different races and classes, until the individual motivations and goals can no longer fit into the equation. You don’t have anything but the end of content to shoot for.
So what’s the answer? The original post notes that it’s not really possible to reconcile anything but achievement-oriented goals within MMOs due to the fact that the character will still inhabit a static world no matter what you do. Certainly, there are attempts to create larger-scale impacts for individual characters, but so long as every character goes through the same content or has the same opportunities, there’s less of a sense of distinct accomplishment. Player-generated content in games such as City of Heroes offers an opportunity for a different path for each character, but there’s still not much of a difference in the actual process. Procedural generation is also bandied about as a solution to the issue, though it lacks any truly successful implementation at this point. Is there even a solution, or is this simply part of the weakness of the genre?
The trouble with goals in MMOs originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted on November 29th, 2009 at 8:00pm by Eliot Lefebvre
Filed Under: academic, city-of-heroes, city-of-villains, coh, cov, cox, culture, game-mechanics, opinion, player-generated-content, thats-a-terrible-idea, virtual-worlds
This week, Linden Lab announced that it was going to start charging listing fees and minimum commissions on its Second Life Xstreet Web-shopping adjunct in the near future. Within hours, vendors took down thousands of products, many abandoning the service entirely in favor of alternative services.
It’s unclear just how many vendors have abandoned the Xstreet SL system, but it apparently was enough to temporarily overload the Web-sites of third-party sites such as Slapt.
Continue reading Linden Lab to raise Xstreet fees, loses vendors, products
Filed under: Business models, Culture, Economy, News items, Opinion, Second Life, Virtual worlds
Linden Lab to raise Xstreet fees, loses vendors, products originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted on November 20th, 2009 at 5:00pm by Tateru Nino
Filed Under: business-models, culture, economy, linden-dollars, linden-lab, opinion, second-life, sl-policy, slapt, virtual-worlds, xstreet, xstreet-sl
It’s a beautiful day in the badlands, with the sun shining down on you unprotected in the wilderness, surrounded by horrible creatures and with only a few dozen bullets left before you are completely defenseless. What’s not to be thankful for? Fallen Earth might not seem like the most appropriate setting for a Thanksgiving celebration, but the game recently held a screenshot contest for either what the player’s character is thankful for or a “traditional” celebration in the wasteland. Yesterday, the winners were announced, with the top entries all receiving special in-game food that offers buffs and the essential proper nutrition for surviving the hostile environment. The first-place winner also receives a Fallen Earth t-shirt.
A small gallery is also available, with the three winners and the honorable mention available for viewing. It’s not every game where appropriate holiday celebration includes heavily-armed men standing on a farm surrounded by corpses, but it works for Fallen Earth and should provide the game’s players with some appropriate chuckles. Or, given the context, perhaps “inappropriate” is more apt.
Filed under: Sci-fi, Screenshots, Fallen Earth, Contests, Culture, Events, real-world
Fallen Earth screenshot contest winners announced originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted on November 20th, 2009 at 3:00pm by Eliot Lefebvre
Filed Under: contests, culture, fallen-earth, fallen-earth-llc, fe, holiday, real-world-events, screenshot, screenshots, thanksgiving-2009
When I was still young, I was out on a walk with my father in the woods next to my great-aunt’s house. The woods were an offshoot of the Devil’s Hopyard state park, which meant that they were old and vast. As the family often congregated around the house, there were a number of paths we knew that wove their way through the forest, but I remember where we always stopped, and I remember the day when I asked what was further along.
My dad grinned, and we kept walking. It was about ten minutes from there to a beautiful, moss-covered waterfall that was right on the edge of the state park, with an alcove just large enough that I could squeeze underneath the falls. That sticks with me every time I start up a new game, because that was when I started to really wonder about where paths might lead. Everything leads somewhere. Finding things out is one of the things I love, probably what attracted me to video games in the first place.
Continue reading MMOrigins: The only living boy in Vana’diel
Filed under: Real life, Culture, Opinion, MMOrigins
MMOrigins: The only living boy in Vana’diel originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted on November 20th, 2009 at 1:00pm by Eliot Lefebvre
Filed Under: culture, mmorigins, opinion, real-life
“Companies should just stop gold farmers.” It’s a consistent complaint in many games, with “gold” replaced by your game’s currency of choice. As complaints go, it’s right around “somebody should do something about all the problems” in terms of overall utility, but heck, no one likes the practice and it should just be eliminated, right? Well, as Scott Jennings has pointed out recently, it’s not quite that easy.
As Lum points out, there are several common misconceptions about the entire process. Among them are the idea that the game company doesn’t step in because they’re getting kickbacks, which is pointed out to fail the simple test of Occam’s razor. When developers want to get more money from an existing game, there are usually better ways to run it, such as the Champions Online model or the Dungeons and Dragons Online approach. He also tackles the infamous statement that the farmers are paying customers and therefore the company has even less incentive to stop them.
So if everyone hates RMT, why is it still around? The article briefly touches upon it, but We Fly Spitfires had a recent post that articulates more specifically: more people buy gold than would necessarily admit it. Since no one will admit to it, no one ever asks, and as a result there’s a large culture of silence that publicly despises it and privately takes part. In short? As long as there’s a customer base, the farming will continue. Food for thought all around.
Filed under: Business models, Culture, Economy, Exploits, Opinion
Why RMT won’t go away originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted on November 20th, 2009 at 10:00am by Eliot Lefebvre
Filed Under: business-models, champions-online, co, culture, ddo, dungeons-and-dragons-online, economy, exploits, gold-farming, lum-the-mad, microtransactions, rmt, scott-jennings, we-fly-spitfires
