Raph has a great post about making massively multiplayer games (and other virtual spaces) more social. This is one of the great failures in the age of World of Warcraft, and it’s one of the main things I dislike about WoW. If you played older games like Ultima Online and EverQuest, you know that both were significantly more social environments. Recent games have failed players in their social aspects more than anything else, and Raph has some good thoughts about how to make virtual spaces more social.

Over the next few months, I’m slowly going to be investigating what “hardcore” really is. For a little background, and for this post to make sense, read my original post. The first thing I want to do before even attempting to find what motivates players to become “hardcore” is: how are players hardcore? What are they willing to do to reach their goals? The first, and most obvious, is time. Continue Reading »

“Hardcore.” It’s an ambiguous term. Everyone throws the word around. Everyone knows what it means. But not everyone agrees. Over the next few weeks (or months), I plan on investigating not only the term “hardcore,” but I plan to create a usable measurement of hardcore that we can refer to when talking about game design. Continue Reading »

People often talk about balancing risk and reward. If a player is taking risks, they should be rewarded significantly. If a player isn’t taking risks they should be rewarded insignificantly. Most of us can agree with that — but have we agreed about it on a more fundamental level? What is risk? What is reward? And, are risk and reward opposite sides of the same coin? Continue Reading »

Players are the x factor of MMOs. If a player can do it, they will do it. They will behave badly if you let them, they will exploit if you let them, they will ruin the experiences of others if you let them. It’s best to mitigate undesirable behavior through reward/punishment or by altering a system’s design to prevent it. But, while heavy-handed artificial restrictions should generally be a last resort, sometimes they are unavoidable.