Psychochild's Blog

Reader (and former co-worker) Christian Knickel wrote me with an interesting question:

If you're going to build a "casual" MMO, what types of core gameplay would it have?

More information after the jump.
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Well, now that we've eaten our turkies (or goose, as the case may be), time to think about holidays. While playing some of my usual games, I was struck that there seemed to be no big celebrations for Thanksgiving. Now, I suspect this is mostly because it's a very U.S.-centric holiday, and the big games are now truly international. But, still, it was interesting that I missed some of the trappings of the particular season in online games.

So, let's think about holidays.
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In last weekend's design challenge, I asked about time commitment. How much time is appropriate for a game to require?

The consensus was "it depends". And, that's true. But, what does it depend on?
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I'm writing up an article on the time required by games, but I thought I'd get some thoughts from you all before I dive in.

So, here's this weekend's challenge: How much time should games require?
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This is going to be an easy design challenge: go learn something new. It doesn't even have to be about game development.

Learning new things is the best way to get exposed to different ideas. What I learned today is after the break.
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It seems like everyone got together and decided to have an interesting discussion right as I was out of town. The issue brought up by Joe Ludwig was: No designer scripting. This assertion created a lot of discussion, including a followup post by Joe.

Since I fancy myself both a programmer and a designer, I have something to say about this!
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Having just gotten back from celebrating my birthday in Hawaii, I figured I'd give everyone an easier challenge this week.

Imagine that a game simulates a paradise. For a game, this will eventually get boring; so, we have to introduce some conflict. So, the challenge is: what is that conflict?

Some thoughts below the jump.
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