Psychochild’s Blog

Gordon over at We Fly Spitfires wrote an interesting article about The Philosophy of Friendship. He takes a look at what friendship in the online world means. The comments are equally insightful, too. Gordon then followed up with a post about Consequences in Virtual Worlds where he expands on the idea of how separate "reality" and the actions in "virtual worlds" really are.

Instead of writing an epic-length comment there, I figured I'd write blog post here.
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People with RSS readers will notice an extra little bit added to the end of the post. It's added by a nifty plugin called RSS Footer. This is mostly to prevent sites that just scrape content from getting free content without at least linking back to me. But people reading via RSS will also get a handy link back to the main article to read and write comments.

Personally, I think those are the best part of the blog. :)
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Sometimes, computer games are a whole other world, and our terminology reflects that. Saying that a game is "addicting" is often meant as a complement. Yet, addiction usually has other connotations (NSFW) in the wider world. So, game developers should be careful about using the word.

Let's take a look at what we usually mean when we use the word, and what it means for game players and game developers.
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No, this isn't an invitation for you to engage in neurosurgery on me. (Although, I'm sure a few people out there would like to know what the hell makes me tick.) What I want to do here is show you what it's like playing and looking at things through the perspective of a game designer.

Yeah, it involves LotRO. I maybe next time I'll do a non-LotRO post. Don't hold your breath.
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I want to talk about running a business in a game. Note that this isn't running a business about games; there's a handy book about that topic if you want to read about that boring subject. ;)

No, instead, I want to cover the topic of how to make money in games beyond murdering monsters and running packages for NPCs. What does it take to run a business within an MMO world?
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I was interviewed for the Digipen Podclass feature. The description says I discussed "effects of current technology and culture on MMOGs" with the host Omaha Sternberg.

Here's a direct link to the interview.
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I wanted to talk a bit about one of the more interesting mechanics in LotRO: Dread and Hope. This is perhaps one of the more interesting mechanics the game has to offer above and beyond the typical DIKU fare. Since I slammed the game a bit for sticking a bit too close to "safe" mechanics, I figured I'd take some time to point out one of the original and interesting bits.
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I've been playing LotRO for about six months now. I've been playing it mostly for fun, and I've had the extra fun of playing it with my better half.

I figured it might be of some interest for me to write about how I approach the game and my general experiences with the game after I've gotten into it a bit.
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There's an old joke about how a person sees the same action in different perspectives. For example:

• I borrow items without asking permission.
• You take things that don't belong to you.
• He (or she) steals things from others.

The joke here is that I don't do anything bad, you (the person I have to worry about the old "punch in the face" from) are a bit worse than I am, and the person we're gossiping about is a horrible human being.

But, I think that this is an interesting way to think about game design.

• Many players say they want one thing.
• Most players do something different.
• Reality dictates what actually can be done.

Let's see how this relates to quests and "innovation", shall we?
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A few months ago, when I was really busy organizing a conference, a group of bloggers started talking about quests and how the relate to the dreaded grind. The discussion lead to an interesting discussion but Michael "Muckbeast" Hartman: New Grind, Just like the Old Grind: Quest Heavy Advancement.

Better late than never, so I'm going to take a look at questing and "grinding" from my own point of view.
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