What’s worse than top 10 lists? Top 100 lists. Of science fiction and fantasy books. Determined by internet voting. Death to you, mediocre popular opinion! And as far as NPR goes, did you guys really need to up your geek pageview count? All right, so fine.… what’d it get wrong? In the wtf are you on this …
Gamification Is Bullshit. So Far.
Gamification is usually bullshit. This means that I mostly agree with Ian Bogost. Intrinsically, it is neither good nor evil. Gamification exploits reward structures common to games, and game-like structures, to incentivize certain behavior. Of course, we can say that nuclear weapons and AK-47s aren’t intrinsically evil, either. But we can expect that the ends …
Games that people should stop trying to copy
Not a week goes by without someone nearby proposing to take an existing game and “make it better.” Maybe the hopeful developer sees a flaw that only they can find, or maybe they love a title so much that they just have to imitate it. Maybe they have an unfounded sense of pride and their …
Don’t Make an MMO
Bill Roper is known for work on Blizzard titles from 1994 to 2003. Since then, he admits that he’s met with less success, for whatever reasons. After his experiences on the sort-of MMO Hellgate, and Cryptic’s two recent releases, Roper expressed concern that the funding model of MMO development is broken, especially when it comes …