Last Tuesday, I presented at the 2008 Game Developers Conference in the mobile track about the best ways of connecting mobile games and MMOs. Here are my slides (PowerPoint file). Gamasutra wrote a surprisingly thorough summary. The session was well-attended; among the audience were several large MMO developers who have yet to announce their mobile plans. It will be interesting to see which directions they go with mobile.
Dan Roy: Thanks for taking the time to answer some questions, Cardell. Let's jump right in. When working on Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), did you think at all about mobile (e.g. checking auctions via WAP or SMS)?
Cardell Kerr: Absolutely! The simple fact is that these games prosper off of continued investment from the player, and there are few mechanics that foster this better than allowing a person to ping an auction house, or allow for some form of online trade. Ultimately, we decided to focus on the heart of the game more so (questing and combat), knowing we could add more support for other options later.
Dan Roy: Thanks for participating in this conversation, Raph. Let's talk MMOs. Throughout your career with MMOs, did you think at all about mobile (e.g. checking auctions via WAP or SMS)? What possibilities with mobile excite you, if any?
Raph Koster: Every project I've ever been on except for the very earliest ones, there was the question of what, if anything, we could expose via mobile. Ideas like letting people check friends online, check status of auctions, do crafting, and so on, were always common proposals.
Personally, I suspect that mobile is going to rapidly grow into being more than just a minor adjunct in the sense that those proposals imply. I think there will be full-blown mobile clients to virtual worlds.
This Saturday I presented at MIT's Media in Transition 5 conference. The presentation covered identity construction, something I've been focusing on in my thesis. Gene Koo, Fellow at Harvard Law, summarized the presentation on his blog. Here's my own shorter summary for the conference program. I also moderated a panel:
Reimagining Identity
Anne Petersen, Perez Hilton and the New Star Production
Thomas Riccio, Trickster Reality
Agnieszka Wenninger, Deleuzian Perspectives on Ownership and Identity on the Web
Moderator: Dan Roy
Kyu C. Lee from Gamevil wasn't able to make it to his scheduled session on the mobile MMO Path of a Warrior (I interviewed Allen Lee last year about this same game). This was due to a scheduling miscommunication between Kyu and GDC, as Kyu had left earlier in the day (I later learned) for his own wedding. Since everyone in the room was interested in mobile MMOs, I couldn't let them just leave without meeting any of them and hearing their perspectives. So, with the blessing of the Conference Associates and the sound technicians in the room, I turned to the session into an impromptu roundtable. It ended up going very well. Read the summary on Gamasutra by Eric-Jon Waugh.
Here's a link to a talk I gave last Monday at the Serious Games Summit at GDC on the learning game I'm designing at MIT with Maryland Public Television and Fablevision. The talk was very well received by a packed room. We started the talk by describing the story, presentation, and gameplay, and ended it by letting the audience play a prototype level from the game as a group.
Here's a short write-up and podcast of me being interviewed at GDC about learning games.
Clark, Andy. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence. NY: Oxford University Press, 2003.
While reading Natural-Born Cyborgs, by Andy Clark, I found his understanding of presence helpful for thinking about what might make players in virtual worlds feel immersed and present. This is an especially tricky question when accounting for the differences of logging into the world from a PC and a cell phone. Clark's conclusion is in part that interactivity enables presence. Luckily, games have plenty of that.
I also enjoyed Clark's description of the self as inclusive of tools and abilities that can change depending upon circumstance and environment. Just as an amputee has a self without a limb, so too can a prosthetic (or even virtual identity) be considered part of the self (more detail below). The self is maleable, which is good news for gamers looking to take on new selves.
The Violet Sector, or TVS, is a cross-platform, text-based, sci-fi MMO. It was designed and developed by The Vision Studios, not coincidentally also TVS. It's primarily meant to be played through a web browser, but you can also access it with your cell phone via WAP, with somewhat reduced functionality.
You start by creating an account and choosing a ship, which determines your class. Example ships include fighters, bombers, and repair ships. Then, the game assigns you to a team. This is the team you will play with for the rest of this instance of the game, which could last months. If your team gets eliminated by one of the other teams, the game will assign you to another team. When one team defeats all other teams, the game ends and starts again fresh.
I just finished playing a game on my cell phone called Love Triangle: Dating Challenge, developed by Longtail Studios. It's a very short dating sim challenging would-be lovers everywhere to navigate the dialogue tree as stereotypically as possible. I assume it's aimed at girls, since the only character you can play is a girl and the gameplay centers around guessing what a man wants. This isn't about cultivating a successful relationship, mind you, as the game ends when you and your man agree to go out together.
The dialogue occasionally made me laugh. Unfortunately, it's pretty linear. Insulting one of the two characters you communicate with leads to a Game over, Try Again screen. The characters were shallow, and there wasn't much room to explore them.
