Psychochild's Blog

Earlier this month Justin "Syp" Olivetti interviewed me for his Game Archaeologist column over at Massively. I went into some depth about my background as a developer, my experiences with Meridian 59, and even a bit about Storybricks.

http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/12/20/the-game-archaeologist-crosses-meridian-59-an-interview-with-br/
http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/12/27/the-game-archaeologist-crosses-meridian-59-a-chat-with-brian-gr/

Got questions? Leave a comment here and I'll answer them as I can.

One problem that the game industry has is that game journalists sometimes lack a sense of professionalism. Many journalists are enthusiastic fans who land a "dream job" related to games; journalism might be as close to the ultimate goal of game development as some people will ever get. The dream of getting paid to play games is probably better realized as a typical journalist than as a game developer.

Unfortunately, this lack of professionalism hurts the game industry. We need more real game journalists who do a good job covering the industry and showing what is really going on. Sadly, this is all too rare and most game "journalism" fails spectacularly.
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Just so the Meridian 59 fans who read this first don't wet themselves: The game will continue running. It just won't be running as a commercial concern with Near Death Studios owning it.

But, today is the official last day of the company. We started it early in 2001 to make games and got the opportunity to buy the rights from Meridian 59 from 3DO; that game dominated NDS's life.

If you're interested in some details, read after the jump.
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The holiday season is often seen as a time for giving. (Or, for some, a time to grind out some achievements to get a special flying mount. Those people are weird.) A few of us MMO bloggers decided to get together and encourage our readers to make some charitable donations to worthy causes.

Read on if you want to know what a bunch of MMO developers think are good causes to support. No, it won't be a Cheetos and Mountain Dew fund for us. :P
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I tend to mention Meridian 59 mostly in passing on here. But, in the current installment of the Interesting Mechanics series, I want to point out one of the better mechanics in M59: the mana nodes. This fits into a larger design pattern I like to call exploration-based rewards.
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I'll be at the LOGIN conference in Seattle next week. I'm speaking on the topic of Designing with Cheaters in Mind.

Feel free to drop me an email if you're going and want to meet up.
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Dear MMO letters,

I've read a lot of the stories about MMO accounts, but I never thought it would happen to me. I was logging on my World of Warcraft account when I saw it...

...a female gnome in her underwear. It was at that point I realized that my account had been violated!
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Over at the official Darkfall blog... wait, I meant Scott Jennings' site (easy mistake to make these days), he's been sounding off about the problems surrounding the game's launch.

If you've been living in a cave and don't know what Darkfall is, it's the new heir apparent to the MMO PvP throne. That is, if the game can stay online long enough to actually get played. That's right, once again, it seems like we're going to get a game that's full of technical problems that won't let the design flaws shine through. Although that sounds completely snarky, there's a kernel of truth in it: I'd love to see a game make some honest mistakes that we could honestly critique, instead of everyone having to look back a decade and talk about Ultima Online or Meridian 59 when we talk about PvP-focused games.

But, the problem is that PvP games suffer from a lot of deeper issues beyond technical instability and insane design decisions. The core problem with these games, in two words: the community.
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Damion pointed out a Kotaku article about Tabula Rasa having a last blowout event. Basically, they're ending their existence by having a doomsday scenario when the Bane take over.

People are saying it's kinda neat, but I don't see it that way. Underneath the bravado, I see it as a sign of people giving up hope. To me, that's kind of depressing. Given that I've been through the shutdown of a game I've worked on, I think I have a unique perspective on things.
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I've been spending some time thinking about fantasy worlds lately, for lots of reasons. As with a lot of things, I choose to blame Richard Bartle for causing this.

First, he wrote about the now infamous torture quests in WoW. Then he mentioned The Lord of the Rings during his presentation on the Pioneer's Panel at Living Game Worlds as being an inspiration for creating a coherent fantasy world.

So, read on for some of my thoughts about how well we've made coherent worlds in our online games.
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