Group items tagged

"The patch impressed and excited me in a way I hadn't felt for a long time in Warcraft. For it seemed to mark the culmination of a sometimes hesitant process of refinement which--via 21 major patches, to date--has since the game launched seen it gradually homing in on a particularly potent notion of fun and player involvement. This shift has meant a move away from wasteful complexity, and towards creating as many decisions as possible that players find meaningful. In blunter terms, it's about pulling psychological levers more effectively--and pulling these for more different types of people. … Throughout the game, more is explained, and more is automated: the designers' own thinking is more clearly visible. A virtual world that six years ago felt esoteric, obtuse or just bloody-minded in places (running ten minutes in the form of a ghost in order to locate your corpse comes to mind) has become almost cosy. It no longer wants you walking for miles to locate a tiny object that can't be seen on a map, or slaying a hundred spiders to get one drop of poison. It wants you progressing, interacting, questing: knowing where the next objectives lie, and the ones after that."

"The Daedalus Project was a long-running survey study of MMO players"

"In this data set, we'll fill in that framework with some quantitative data to get a better sense of what changes from stage to stage. The player life-cycle proposed has 5 stages:" Stages are: starting, ramping up, mastery, burn out, and casual/recovery.

"Needless to say I was intrigued by the indie movie Second Skin and the people that were portrayed in the film. A benefit of the wonder of the internet is the ability to actually locate people that you would never know how to get a hold of. It works wonderfully to reunite old family members, rekindle old relationships and even get in touch with old school members. bustardIt also works great for journalists, luckily I ran into Dan Bustard on Facebook. When I approached him asking if it was who I thought it was he was very apprehensive, he first asked me if he owed me money. After awhile he opened up and he agreed to an interview. And here it is"