Archive for March, 2010

I wanted my first column for LevelCapped to focus on an introduction to what I’ll be providing the site with week in and week out, but having gone to PAX East this past weekend I couldn’t resist sharing some of my observations with you instead.

Fortunately, those reflections are aimed squarely at the player experience, which is the short explanation for what this column is about. Next week I’ll elaborate on what you can expect from Player XP. Until then let us look at some of the things learned from PAX panel discussions.

I just can’t quit you

Guild drama was a topic that reared its ugly head and what we found out was that arguments and disagreements were somehow ugly-beautiful. A good number of players stay in guilds precisely because that kind of tension exists in the first place. Apparently we fancy it as entertainment or possibly it functions like a bad relationship that still has value. It becomes an emotional feedback loop that might not work very well, but certainly can be counted on.

This is not exclusive to all groups of players, of course, and the vast majority of guilds lose members or fracture and disband because the people involved can’t resolve their differences, but know that their is a contingent of gamers out there that like there conversation served with teeth and you might be one of them.

As Long as You’re in the Other Room

The social aspect of gaming is fundamental to our interest in them. It has long been held in MMOs that the need to play together is why we keep coming back. However, there is an opposing trend that has taken hold rather quietly. Some are finding that we don’t actually need to be playing together, even over long stretches of time, to keeping coming back. Instead we only need a means to communicate and track the relevance of our friends lives.

Some of us are looking for a connecting point more than we are looking for a friend to slay a dragon with. And many of us are content to pursue personal goals by solo’ing quests instead of running off to that next Raid in the end-game, so long as we have a chat channel and an audience.

The Judge is on Holiday

Finally. most people, while not willing to gush over them, agreed that Social Games are still very young and need to mature as a demographic, but have potential. There are key elements to games like Farmville that produce red flags, however. They broadcast too much, leverage user’s friends directly in order to grow their player base, and generally lack a sophistication that some veteran gamers don’t care for.

These points are only exacerbated by the massive number of users that social game developers can tap into and on some level it seems to be another threat to the on going marginalization of PC games; many hardcore gaming enthusiasts bread and butter -myself included.

All is not yet lost, though, with services like OnLive on the horizon we may find everything shifting toward a device agnostic future and the means to make the gaming component of the web much more than just a platform for flash games and Facebook socializing. We might get some healthy game mechanics and better business practices out of it as well.