There’s a great postmortem of the Metaplace game jam we did a couple of weeks back at WorldIV.com » Surprisingly, Making Games is Hard Work. The jacks game I made I did jacks – I was planning on doing Pente after that. My thoughts on it: Gosh, a lot of people don’t know what jacks...

We’re laying out Metaplace Central again. We have iterated it a lot, as we try out different flows, add new tech that makes it more appealing, and so on. These days, what with the balloons, the board games on the table by the cafe, and the many teleporters to user worlds, layout is growing mor...

Those of you who have read Theory of Fun for Game Design may recall this passage: Let’s picture a game wherein there is a gas chamber shaped like a well. You the player are dropping innocent Jews down into the gas chamber, and they come in all shapes and sizes. There are old ones and young one...

Edit: I don’t actually play EVE, just watch from afar. I’ve corrected some errors below that players of EVE mentioned to me. A few days ago, everyone wanted me to write about the massive destruction of the Band of Brothers alliance in EVE Online, and how Goonsquad GoonSwarm finally trium...

Chat is never enough. It should be a truism, but far too many social virtual spaces and even sites have fallen down in this regard.You build a social environment, maybe theme it a little bit, and sit back and expect people to turn it into a vibrant community. But nothing happens. It doesn’t ca...

I’ve said before that socialization requires downtime, by which I mean that people who are busy pressing a bunch of other buttons or busy watching a dozen different colored bars have pretty much given all their attention to it, and therefore have difficulty having a conversation (or indeed pay...

I still pay a lot of attention to social networking theory (not the stuff about the sites, but the research around how humans form networks of influence), ever since doing all the research that led up to my 2003 “Small Worlds” presentation. So this Reuters report that scientists have fou...

No, not top sellers like Braid. Ordinary indies that don’t manage to hit the top of the charts or land an XBLA deal — the stuff that comes and goes on the web portals, made by a guy or gal in the evenings working on it, often churning out hidden object games or another match-3 game becau...

After the whole Threshold deal with Wikipedia and losing mud history, a new Wiki was created on Wikia in order to preserve mud history. I’ve put up a detailed LegendMUD entry with a bunch of citations. Yeah, it’s a conflict of interest, and I am sure I am misremembering stuff or letting ...

I wish someone who has a good memory of these things and was there, would document that the key game design features of a DIKU are, if everyone is going to refer to MMOs as DIKU derivatives. – a comment from Daniel Speed on Broken Toys » Wikicrap. Glossing much here… DikuMUD was derived...