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  • GDCOnline: UO Classic Game Postmortem

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 8 Comments

    Well, we basically winged it, but it was a blast. We told stories, mostly out of order; fessed up to bad code and goofy decisions and being painfully young; and lamented the loss of that sens of crazy freedom.

    Luckily, Gamasutra has you covered if you weren’t in the full house.

    In the alpha, the team had wolves that chased rabbits across the map as part of its emergent gameplay system.

    In those early days, the rabbits would actually level up if they got into a fight with a wolf and managed to escape.

    “People would wander off in the alpha and try to kill a rabbit, and pretty soon they were playing Monty Python: The MMO,” joked Koster.

    The game was tweaked to disallow this, though Koster confesses that they left one monster rabbit in the world when the final game shipped.

    I wore my original UO shirt… and forgot to point it out! Doh!

    Basically, during the period when we were skunkworks and ignored by the company (it was mutual, we ignored them back) we did our own marketing. So that meant we made our own t-shirts with a made-up logo. And I still have that shirt, in surprisingly good shape for being from 1996. All credit to Clay Hoffman for making it, way back when…

     

     

  • GDCOnline: A Theory of Fun, 10 Years Later

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 32 Comments

    Here are the slides for the design track keynote I gave yesterday.

    And here they are as a PDF. Edit: thanks to Alexandre Houdent for providing a version of the PDF that works on all OSes…

    Among the topics: a recap of Theory of Fun, discussion of what I would change about it today, and all the thoughts it led me to: game grammar, games as art, games as math, the ethics of games, gamification, etc. With a dash of Classical philosophy.

    I had the shakes bad before I started… but it felt like it came together in the end.

    Apologies to anyone whose face I rendered unrecognizable. And the unlabelled woman is Jane McGonigal.

    The press coverage so far:

    A challenge for you all: can you name all these people without peeking at the slides? Read More “GDCOnline: A Theory of Fun, 10 Years Later”

  • GDCOnline: revisiting A Theory of Fun

    Hours Categories Game talk

    So the third thing I will be doing at GDCOnline has now been announced:

    A Theory of Fun 10 Years Later

    Design | 60-Minute | Track Keynote | All
    TBD

    Ten years ago, at the very first Austin Game Conference, online gaming pioneer Raph Koster delivered an inspiring keynote on why games matter, how they teach players, and what fun is. That talk served as the foundation for his valuable book, A Theory of Fun for Game Design, challenging game makers to build entertaining, engaging, and addictive experiences. Now, for the tenth anniversary of his presentation, Koster will revisit A Theory of Fun to discuss what has changed in the science and the theory in the intervening years.

    Yup, this is actually the tenth anniversary of the original Theory of Fun talk. Hard to believe! I think most did not become aware of it until I reprised it as the keynote of the Serious Games Summit at GDC the next year… And then, of course, the book also followed later that year too.

    Read More “GDCOnline: revisiting A Theory of Fun”

  • GDC Online 2012 Call for Speakers

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 2 Comments

    I’m on the Advisory Board again this year. Submit your talks!

    GDC Online 2012 Call for Speakers Open through May 2

    The call for submissions to present lectures, roundtables, full day tutorials and
    panels at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) Online 2012 is
    now open through Wednesday, May 2nd.

    GDC Online focuses on the development of connected games including
    social network titles, free-to-play web games, kid-friendly online
    titles, large-scale MMOs, and beyond. The event returns to Austin, Texas
    on October 9-11, 2012.

    The advisory board is seeking submissions from social & online game
    professionals with expertise in any of the following tracks: Business
    & Marketing, Design, Production, Programming and Customer Experience.
    We are also accepting submissions for the four summit programs; Game
    Narrative Summit, Smartphone & Tablet Games Summit, Game Dev Start-Up
    Summit and GDC Gamification Summit.

    *Please see our submission guidelines and full details here:
    http://www.gdconline.com/conference/c4p/index.html

    *Submit a proposal here:
    http://online2012.gdc4p.com/