I follow a lot of blogs and news sites via an RSS feeder. Lately I have noticed that certain posts pop up in the wrong places. I’m seeing WordPress news popping up on game design blogs – posts written by someone other than the site owner.

I admit that I have actually been thinking that the problem was my RSS reader – I have even been looking into getting a different reader, one that actually worked… but… today it struck me. All the posts that are “out of place” are on WordPress hosted blogs!

So basically what WordPress is doing is putting their own news about WordPress updates and conferences into other peoples RSS feeds! I am very happy that I decided on hosting my own blog, instead of using their hosting service.

I would get so very P***** if someone posted news into my feed.

On a more personal note – I am currently sick, resulting in the low posting rate on my blog Hopefully I will be able to pick up the pace soon.

I´m one of those people who preordered Age of Conan, and yesterday I was let into the MMO.

Of course there was a bunch of connectivity problems, and problems downloading the patch, but in the end I hooked up to the world.

I must say that this game really intrigues me! Besides from the obvious blood, gore, and naked people (yes you can take of your clothes in the game….), it also has a very nice feel to it.

You can play a variety of classes and “races”, but that isn´t really all that exciting.

What is exciting is the combat system!

Usually I play a mage type of character in RPG games – but not with this combat system!

Basically whenever you are in combat you need to decide from which side to swing your weapon, and need to change your strategy constantly depending on the defense of your opponent. Combine that with special combo-moves that make you push the buttons in a certain way to accomplish them, and you have a very engaging combat system!

My current verdict is….

If you played WoW and found the game a bit too cartoonish – play Age of Conan.

If you played MMO’s and found the combat to be very dull because you just needed to activate the “attack” function and then sit and wait – try out Age of Conan, it´s completely different.

So far I´m very impressed by the game!

I´m home from Sweden and Nordic Game. The experience has been a nice one, although I can´t get rid of a bad taste in my mouth about the whole thing. To me it seemed that last year the talks where just better and more challenging. This year there was a lot of “round-table” sessions. The problem with these is that if you don’t put people in the discussion who actually disagree on something you will get a bunch of people sitting around agreeing and padding each other on the shoulder.

However there were a few good talks and I got to meet a bunch of interesting people. I had planned a bunch of video interviews, but it turned out that some of the people didn´t have time for it anyways. I would however like to thank the following people for their time

• Jørgen Tharaldsen from Funcom
• Hans von Knut from Portaplay
• Jonas Wæver from The Nameless Mod.
• Ruben van der Leun from…. Holland
• David Helgason from Unity.

The videos will be online soon.

Besides that there really isn´t much to say except – we managed to dodge the attention of Lord Vader. I saw some people being taken away by him after the first key-note – poor fellas

So I´m at my hotel room now. The hotel room i had actually booked turned out to be overbooked, so the original hotel put me in a cab and drove me to another hotel where i am now at. Its a pretty standard hotel…i just cant seem to understand why they insist on having brown wallpaper?!

Today has been pretty good. I’ve had some nice talk with the people developer Unity, as well as done most of my covershots. I also set up an appointment with David Edry who is the Worldwide Manager for Xbox Live Arcade….which pretty much means that all games going on Xbox Live Arcade need to be approved by him. Besides that he’s an academic at MIT, so we speak each others language. I am really looking forward to this interview about Microsofts views on casual gaming, XNA, and the coming XNA community stuff.

But walking around all day, constantly talking to people, or being filled by info from the different lectures….REALLY takes the crap out of me. I am completely beat now - my sheets are calling for me to sleep.

But tomorrow i will be back - and i am very much looking forward to the large Rock Band presentation (with special guest). I’m sure it will be awesome!!

Photos and videos will be online as soon as i get home

Tomorrow is a day I have been waiting for, for a long time. It’s the first day of the Nordic Game conference, the event of the year (in my book).

This year I´ve set up a bunch of interviews with interesting people which you will be able to see posted here on the blog as soon as I get home.

Besides that I will hopefully be able to connect to my hotels network so I can make a post tomorrow evening with some nice pictures in it.

I´m really looking forward to this – I´m hoping it will be as good as last year

I like to play games. I probably play more games than the “normal” person. However I´ve discovered something. For some reason I can´t find any interest in games that don´t “get to the point” almost immediately. If I don’t see a point with what I am doing I get bored very fast, and shut down the game.

I find it a bit strange though. I am fully capable of sitting down and watching an old, long, and boring silent movie. But when it comes to games I just lose my temper almost immediately if the game doesn’t tell me what the point is.

“Why am I shooting these people?”

“Why do I need to stack these crates?”

“Why do I have to read all of this completely irrelevant text before I get to earn my achievement points?”

It´s what I call noise, in the Raph Koster kind of way.

For some reason a bunch of games these days seem to be noise to me. Either I am getting old and need to work on grokking some new stuff – or games are just getting worse?

No games mentioned, no games left out….

This is a follow up on the post I did here: http://www.designosis.net/2008/05/09/linearity-in-mmo-design/

I find that the linear MMO template seems to be the industry standard. For some reason (understandably) game companies like to play it safe – and using the linear template usually results in the widest target audience.

A linear template is like shooting with a shotgun instead of a sniper rifle – you just hit more people with it!

There are some basic aspects of this design template that usually show up in the game designs:

• Theme park
• The player runs around trying out all the different rides – NPC quest givers.
• Quest log to keep track of where to go next – will usually always contain something for the player to do.
• Quick and dirty level up to begin with to get the players hooked.
• Social interaction
• Having a good guild system with good social interaction possibilities (voice-chat, chat, special guild perks) prolongs the gameplay, since players will be more likely to come back just to talk to their friends.
• Immersive world design with little or no player-interaction
• The game usually has a strong an immersive setting letting the narrative driven players think they are “part of an ever expanding world”. Fact is, these worlds almost never change, and players have absolutely no influence on it when they do.

The near future might prove some changes to the linear template, but I am betting that at least two of the above mentioned strategies will stay.

Age of Conan and Warhammer Online has an interesting take on the world design, letting the players destroy cities and thereby change the world. I am however uncertain if you will only be able to destroy player built cities, and uncertain if whether these cities will “re-spawn” when having been destroyed.

All in all – I am very much looking forward to what will happen in the MMO field in the nearest future.

More on non-linear design templates soon.

(This is a repost from my old blog. I am going to post a bunch of MMO stuff the next few days/weeks, so i needed this here for reference )

I´m an avid MMO player. I started out with Ultima Online, switched to EverQuest, Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online and now Eve Online. This has made me think about the structure of such games, and the tendency to design these games on an almost completely identical template.

As I see it the MMO genre can be boiled down to two different design tendencies (and yes I am simplifying things a bit – but hey it´s my blog). I´ll call these tendencies “Templates” as it seems like MMO design tend to be based on the exact same design philosophies, as I will try to show in the following.

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I sidste weekend var jeg en tur i Aalborg og benyttede her lejligheden til at få Morten S. Pedersen og Jacob Korsgaards synspunkter på Microsoft Student Partner programmet. De har begge været med i længere tid end mig og det var rimeligt cool at høre hvad de har haft af oplevelser med programmet. Blandt andet er Morten blevet ansat hos Microsoft i USA, allerede før han er færdig med sit speciale - måske på grund af at hans CV indeholdt titlen “Microsoft Student Partner” (og så er han selvfølgeligt også en mega dygtig programmør!).

I løbet af Lørdagen fik jeg filmet en del, både fra Filofil arrangementet med de mange seje spiludviklere, men også filmet nogle af Morten og Jacobs tanker og anbefalinger til Microsoft Student Partner programmet. Filmen kan du se nedenfor, og hvis du kunne tænke dig at høre mere om hvordan det er at være student partner, eller om hvordan man bliver det er du velkommen til at kontakte en af os danske partnere, eller gå direkte til kilden på Martin Esmanns blog

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There´s about 6 months until I have to write my bachelor thesis for my film and media studies at Copenhagen University. However the next six months I won´t be having any classes – but basically just need to hand in an assignment that’s already done. That means I will be having PLENTY of free time on my hands, so I thought I might as well begin research for my BA assignment, which will hopefully then result in a top grade.

I will be writing about Narratives in MMO mission design – or something like that Since I am still doing research I might change the subject slightly.

I will be using Eve Online as my main example, since this will enable me to not only look at the narratives from a purely design perspective, but also let me delve into some of the sociological aspects of MMO’s. Eve online seems to be perfect for this because of its implicit narratives – the players more or less have to make them up themselves within the provided framework.

Also I am hoping that the new Age of Conan game will provide a nice subject for the paper as well. The game seems to be focused on providing the players with a strong graphical (and grim) style, as well as provide them with a nice story (and a single player part).

I am hoping to get some collaboration from CCP and Funcom for my thesis. I would love to get their input on my thoughts, and hopefully they can correct me when I am wrong.

Also I would like to avoid writing too much about World of Warcraft – it’s been done to death (by me as well).

If you have any suggestions on good MMO research/books/theories let me know. I´ve just ordered a bunch of books on the subject – hopefully they will help me narrow down the subject a bit as well as provide suggestions on where I should go next. The books are:

• Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games by E. Castronova.
• Play Between World: Exploring Online Game Culture by TL. Taylor.

I´ve also ordered “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy” – but that’s just because I´m a psychology nerd

All suggestions, comments, and referrals are welcomed!