f13.net

There's a bunch of old material that has just gone up on my website at http://www.raphkoster.com, so if you have been wondering what I've been speaking and thinking about in the last year while the site wasn't updated, there it is. The last two blog posts should have a bunch of links.

You are off your rocker.

I wouldn't go that far...

I kind of liked the slide show, interesting way of presenting it. The stuff near the end of course is what interests people - will we ever see true user contribution online games (that don't self distruct in a griefer paradise)?

Second Life is a step in that direction, but its really more of a toolset/sandbox than a "game". Still, I think they are on the right track. You just need something a little more accessable to the masses.

I do believe that's a big part of why I have so many adoring fans.

Loved the slideshow.

Everyone doesn't really want games that appeal to women.  Everyone really just wants women to play their games.  Otherwise, wouldn't everyone be specifically looking to hire females to be on the design team, or to take more chances when it comes to design?

Once upon a time there was a world where half of the population couldn't see the color blue. Painters got very frustrated when people kept asking them to paint their house the color of the sky, or of water, because they couldn't see blue, most of them, and they didn't know what was being asked for.

The painter's union started having seminars on blue. "Sort of greenish, but with less yellow in it."

The painter trade association was very surprised when something sort of purplish sold very well, and immediately started measuring the red quotient in it.

A lot of fans of painting said that it didn't matter, because blue was sissy anyway, and not real painting.

But the people who could see blue kept insisting that blue was all around them, if only they would look and see.

So a few of the painter companies tried hiring some of the folks who could see blue. They quickly complained that other workers were painting over their blue all the time, because they couldn't see it. "Outline it in yellow?" they were told. Or, "Are you sure there's really blue out there? Because we see no evidence of it, and market research says that there aren't any blue paintings that sell." A lot of them never got hired, because it was figured that if they were crazy enough to want to paint with blue, they'd probably make bad employees.

A lot of the folks who could see blue ended up doing other things with paint instead--calligraphy, or graphic design. Nobody really noticed that they used blue like crazy, so it was only the painting industry that had a limited market.

Eventually, though, it was noticed that over time, everyone gets to see blue--the folks who didn't see it tended to start seeing it as they got older. But then they had trouble working in the painting industry too, because they were too old, and their paintings didn't have enough red and yellow in them, and were "too subdued for the market."

In the end, the anti-blue brigades even got the industry to the point where the top sellers were only certain shades of yellow and red and green.

The conclusion, of course, was inevitable. Painting was probably inherently incompatible with blue. There was never a market for blue. Those blue-seers who worked with paints adapted in order to make a living.

And that's why in that world there tend to be very few seascapes or pictures of puffy clouds.

Your aphorism needs more cowbell.

Technically, I think it is a parable. An aphorism is something like "The Internet is the platform for virtual worlds; PCs and consoles are just the way you access them."

I told you that acid was some good shit.. just smoke a bowl and you'll come down a little man.. and put your damn shirt back on..

I think it is a great comentary on oral sex and society.  The great Blue debate.

Aphorism just sounded so much better.

I loved that parable. And I look forward to Raph's next blue painting.

Me too, but I hope he doesn't JUST use the color blue.  That wouldn't hold my attention very long.

At least it wasn't a car analogy. Those do by definition not work.

Clearly all games must have red, and the fact that your mythical game doesn't have red means it'll never attract the attention of my guild, who is everyone, thus you will fail. See you in Crimsonbane!

You've got what? Two and a half weeks before your book comes out?

Tomorrow (http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0471752738), actually. But it has very little blue.

I also won't be hyping it here. To quote Tycho of Penny Arcade, it's not FOR you.

Amazon was listing it for December 5th. And you should hype it everywhere you can. You wrote it, you should be proud of it. In fact, I consider myself a dummy and could probably use most of the information in the book. That is if I don't drool all over the pages to the point where I can no longer read them.

Yes, he should hype it. Especially since I may in fact have an anecdote within it.

I agree with Shockeye, or at the very least his avatar should buy it.  Secondly, someone really needs to photoshop someone falling off that bridge on the cover.

It has a new cover now. Amazon has the correct one. I had nothing to do with either cover.

B&N wanted it first. Something about being one of the biggest booksellers in the world lets em do that sort of thing.

Enough about my book for newbies. There's a whole world of blue out there! (I believe, anyway. I can't see any blue.)

Dude, whore that motherfucker out like you got kneepads and chapstick. When(if) my novel gets published, you can goddam bet I'll do the same.

Let me help you pimp it a bit. All better.

I see your pimp and raise you another!

My god. You willingly chose Freddie. You have no shame.

I was seriously considering Freddie Mercury, but I'm not that secure in my masculinity.

Raph had such a nice thread here once.

I think I would respect you more with Mercury.


Hulk smash!

The question is whether I or my book are in the index of Lum's book. If not, I'll have to kick him out of the thread. After all, he will likely outsell me by an order of magnitude. :P

Raph, just write "MMO Design for Dummies."

(See how fast blue gets covered up?  Snap).

Richard Bartle already wrote it (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0131018167/qid=1132171578/sr=8-5/ref=pd_bbs_5/103-1080211-4526264?v=glance&s=books&n=507846). (THAT book, I'll hype. It's good.)

(Yes, Raph, you're in the book. Although the editor tried to say I misspelled "Ralph".)

I don't think "Raph is a schmuck, virtual world r 4 l00zerz!!1!@!!!one!" is really what he was looking for..

Why would he a need a book for that one, when he can get it here for free?  :rimshot:

I will buy the Lum book, if only for the fame by distant association it will grant me (in my own head, mostly). Unless he didn't use my 'greatest MMOG moment'. In that case, I will do everything in my power to ruin his book sales  :evil:

Since I am powerless, it really won't hurt the bottom line at all.

We don't need blue, we need blues. Purples and greens also. Blue is a color on the palette, but the palette is for mixing. Blue alone annoys the blue blind. Their eyes skip over blue content unless it has a little orange or white mixed in. Also, even those who can see blue don't want it for its own sake. If it isn't as masterfully painted as everything else, they'll be as disappointed as those who can't see it at all.

Enough metaphor.

I don't know what players want, but I know what I want. I want stories to tell. I don't care if "content" is player created, but story absolutely must be. My own words. A few examples from my gaming past:

Thed Ffnod was a fisherman before it became profitable to be so. He had a long white beard, wore a pink floppy hat, dressed in a long pink robe, and gave away free fish with a semi-religious fervor. It turns out that fishing is excellent strength training. Interested in exploring a little, Thed learned how to use a hammer so he might protect himself in the forest. One  day a mad mage decided to kill Thed while he was fishing. Old Ffnod resigned himself to a quick death, he didn't have much of value and this sort of thing happened fairly often. The mage fart-failured a few energy bolts... so Thed got his hammer out "just in case". The mage continued to fail. Thed watched. The mage grew frustrated and pulled out an ornate, poisoned kryss. He struck Thed once, and by reflex the old man attacked in return...

...and slew him with one blow.

His angry ghost haunted Thed for many minutes.

-

I made Book as a cave shaman before it was popular to do so. I was just curious what that spec line did. This was fairly shortly after the battlegrounds had been added to Dark Age of Camelot. Midgard held the central keep and one of those interminable waiting games was happening outside the front gate. About six of us huddled near the door, about ten of them on the bridge. Every once in a while some crazy skirmisher would breach the no-man's land between, leading to some short lived exchange of arrows and magic... but for the most part we waited for the other side to make the first move.

Screw that, I thought. Cave shamans have an AOE poison and an AOE disease (which halves the effectiveness of healing). They're all standing in a huddle on that bridge, I'll bet I can get them all. I did. With both.They went into a panic. "CHAAAAARGE!" We slaughtered all but two.

"Book is like an army!" somebody said.

-

The Gray Maelstrom was a god-like being from another dimension, stabilized within a containment suit so he can function in ours. When the mad scientist who summoned him was mugged and left in a coma, the Maelstrom turned to fighting crime. Technically he was a "defender", but his powers were of mostly offensive design. Still, he could not do everything on his own... when a task proved beyond his ability one day he called out "Who Can Assist Me? I Am Not Omnipotent In This Weakened State." On this particular day help came in the form of a scrapper named The Little Mermaid. "You're huge!" she said when she saw him. "You Are Small." he replied. She had dangerous claws. The task went well.

"My name is Ariel," she explained later, "and the sea witch Ursula exiled me to a lake here in Paragon City..."

-

There's this one quest in the Orc/Troll starting area where you get to blackjack slacking peons. I didn't complete the quest so I could come back there and do it again when I got bored. Huhuhuh.

---

I tell those stories to other gamers and they say "That game sounds awesome!" and then I say something like "No, the game was lousy. It was all about doing the same boring thing over and over again. Just every once in a while something memorable would happen, unrelated to the game but inspired by it." As a member of a dungeon running group in DAoC once pointed out,  even though they were technically failures, it was a lot more fun to try to rescue a group deep inside a dungeon (get people together... sneak around... die again... have everyone cheer when we finally succeeded!) than to grind the dungeon itself. We weren't getting any experience, but it never felt like a waste.

I don't care if I can have a house or make a town or craft unique items or change the world. If it doesn't lead to stories it's just the same boring thing I have to do over and over in order to make it feel like I'm playing the game for any reason at all.

Hey Lum, where should we order it so that you get the most money kicked back?

Like the guy who is riding his motorcycle around the world (http://www.advrider.com/forums/showthread.php?t=41699) has a spot on a website where you pay him like $25 and he mails you a signed hardcover book, instead of paying $16+$5 shipping for a non-signed paperback off amazon.

I would assume since it's part of the Dummies series, he won't see any extra kickback from certain venues. I would imagine he sees money based on the number of sales, not where it is sold.

(http://www.cr.nps.gov/delta/blues/images/people/charley_patton.jpg)

Once again reality taught Raph the harsh lesson of designing for the lowest common denominator versus an elite subset.

 :rimshot:

Really that was sad then funny.

Raph, I enjoyed your concepts behind Entertainers in SWG.  And your "Theory of Fun" was an interesting read.  Too bad the theory wasn't put into practice.

Although it's hard to define what exactly IS fun for most people, here's just a couple things that are most definitely not fun:

1.  Standing in a virtual cantina that is empty, except for yourself - waiting for someone to come by so you can enhance them and their gameplay, after which they run off and leave you all alone again (The Entertainer post-Mastery "content" in SWG).  Not fun. 

2.  Asking questions regarding the NGE changes for Entertainers, before the NGE went Live, and being totally ignored.  Not fun at all.  You guys just copied and pasted the same blurb about Entertainers.  I know we're not a big segment of the gaming community, however that is more a result of the complete failure of Entertainers to really help provide serious fun atmospheres in the game...more than people just don't want to play that playstyle.  Allow me to specify:

     SWG had a ton of event decoration stuff thrown in the game awhile ago.  Stages, Jukeboxes with REAL Star Wars soundtrack music, city decorations, NPC decorations, and so on.  This is a great way to facilitate some fun in the game with player events - player-created content.  And who sells all of these fabulous trinkets?  Entertainers?  No, a non-player character.  A money sink in the game instead of applicable content for Entertainers to facilitate fun in the game.  Poor decision.

Again, liked the book.  Theories are nice.  Just wish you'd put some of that into practice and let Entertainers have fun in this game.

What I got out of "Theory of Fun" was that I was able to better articulate to myself why I wasnt' having fun in certain games and how to avoid games that I won't find fun.

I thought that the Theory of Fun was partly born out of the experience that he had designing and overseeing SWG (as well the criticism thrown against it after it was released). Kind of hard to apply it to that game, wouldn't you think?

I still haven't read it, but I'm totally with him as far as the main point (as I know it) goes..

I'd really like to play one of these games Raph has made since the book (not to mention see him do something commercial again).[

And can I mail you a copy and get it signed? Not that I would mail you a sock filled with mustard.

Perhaps it would be easier for Raph if everyone sends their book to schild or me and we can harass Raph to sign them at GDC provided he's going, of course.

OK, how long has this icon been there? I luv.

The problem with entertainers is complicated. Yeah it sucks that people run in, get buffed, then leave. Then again, why would they stick around?

At one point I don't think entertainers even gave buffs. (Or useful ones, anyway)  You could make the buffs take 20 minutes to perform and be a virtual requirement for combat, but that would just piss everyone off.

I think making it so that people HAVE to hang around with entertainers is a poor approach. A better approach would be to allow entertainment to not count against your total mastery points (or whatever SWG calls them) and have it be basically a role-play thing only. In real life people watch entertainment to be entertained. In a game, they are already supposed to be being entertained! It doesn't make sense. "Go to this cantina to have a good time." The whole game is supposed to be a good time - that's the point.

A really long time, poor old Raph.  When you reply, click on "more" next to the smilies.  I don't even know what some of them are for... like what does it mean when I say this:   :cthulu: ?

I assume that means that our Future Lord And Master Cthulhu is coming to get you. Remember, he eats his worshippers first to spare them the years of pain and madness. Sounds like the MMO industry. ;)

On entertainers--the thought back then was that if coming to cantinas is optional, people simply won't. At the time, there weren't really many examples of successful social spaces in MMOs where everyone was chasing around looking for XP. Taverns in just about every game were empty.

Turns out the secret was dancing and skimpy clothes, but who knew, other than AO? Now dancing is in all the games (and yes, I am bitter about how much fun people made of me when I wanted to put dancing in...).

What I wanted was to tune it to the point where you stopped by a cantina or town every few hours for a few minutes; little pain, opportunity for bumping into folks. Given the giant-size worlds, pulling people back to town felt important. WoW solves this differently, by only allowing you to successfully exist in a very few possible locations at any gvien level, so the density is usually high.

I also have to point out that the tavern scene was actually pretty good until Holocrons went in; that really changed the tone of everything in the game...

I had a great time dancing in the cantinas way back when.  I never once afk macro-ed myself in them either... once in a great while I left myself logged in on a lonely mountaintop... but that's about it.  I thought dancing, musician and image thingy person were inspired touches.  Those and being able to be a creature handler or smuggler were what got me to join... the whole choosing your skills scheme, actually.  It certainly wasn't Star Wars that compelled me... I've never been a fan and thought the movies were kind of awful.  I was sad when the cantina scene dried up and people started afk grinding their way up the ladder.  It was all very clever until then.  I never did the skimpy clothes/lap dance/cyb0r thing, but it was good fun to watch!  I really felt as if I were in a real cantina. Half the time I did my dancing in my combat armour and thought it was TOO cool.  Some of the most clever things I've seen outside of a mud were in that game!

Well, I guess I was going with the idea that he came up with ideas for "Theory of Fun" while he worked on the game, not over a cup of coffee and a notebook after stopping all work on SWG.  Some of the concepts in the book were likely being devised while he worked on the game, and Entertainers became a rather unfun thing to do in SWG for quite awhile.  We had our moments, of course, like Cantina Crawls - where 100's of Entertainers from across the galaxies would join on one server and visit a planet's cantinas.  But the development side did little to foster more fun for us in our everyday play, aside from some new songs and dances that didn't really affect our gameplay much.  And removing Battle Fatigue, which then caused the cantinas to sit deserted most of the time, or with a lone Entertainer (who often was AFK).

Interesting.  Thanks for the reply.  And yes, holocrons pretty much threw everything in the game into chaos. 

I guess I'm just most disappointed with the fact that for several months Entertainers, who were to be a means of providing...entertainment....weren't very entertaining.  Rather than entertaining others, it became a "watch your avatar move around or play music" thing - because the cantinas did become abandoned, except the odd crafter who came by (if one came by at all).  And, I guess your fears of nobody coming to cantinas pretty much came true.  I only hope there's something else to draw folks back, purely for fun, and that it happens sometime in the very near future.

Cantinas used to be a blast.  I got into Entertainer right before the holocrons got into full swing and the AFK buffbots took over our buff roles.  Those two things were a pretty devestating blow to Ents.  Theaters also stand pretty much empty - I wish there was a lot more functionality there.

Anyways, good book - but I wish some of those things you came up with were applied to SWG, because for Entertainers...if you're not having fun and providing a fun environment for others, why be in the game?

I get this mental image of a mariachi trio following adventurers around...
(http://www.phylbert.homestead.com/files/SmiliesMariachi.gif)

Serpent's Cross Tavern? But as you mention, AO held one key, the LCD, anyway. Skimpy clothes, blah. Why not jut add in exotic dancing if your pimping for geeks? Problem is, socializers might like taverns, but achievers don't.

I say fuck the achievers (™ Carlin). But hey, that's the OCD $$$ base.

I tried to string together flourishes to make some decent little tunes, it was just too rudimentary to be of interest for more than a short time. At least a midi interface, imo. I think the system I proposed in beta (that I acknowledge would be HARD) was similar to Acid loops. None of my ideas should ever be implemented, because you'd have loops of fucktards saying "poop".

Really, mmogs suck because there are too many people with not enough accountability. I don't know how you can fix that, if I did I'd build a money house.

But it all comes down to accountability. Without it, you can't put in the cool and fun stuff, you can only make these dumbed-down safety bubbles. How about A Theory of Accountability?

That Bartle player type thing is well past its sell by date, and is itself highly perverted by the design decisions of the MMOG industry. Let's take the 'explorer' motivator, which would be the strongest one for me. Content is usually tiered in such a way that a player must take the path of the catass achiever in order to discover new things and fiddle with new skills and gear. Half the people in WoW actually want epic loot and raid dungeons to play with something new and different, not to lord it over the less endowed. Once they have explored, they care not that they are ahead or behind the other achievers.

SW:G was good for the tourism part of exploring, apart from there being too much dynamic scenery, and not enough static stuff. But exploring is like hacking (http://www.eps.mcgill.ca/jargon/jargon.html#hacker) too - you want to fiddle with all the possiblities of the characters and crafting and so on. The 'blue frogs' of test center were explorer nirvana. However, more than anything, exploring is discovering things, figuring out how to get into parts of the game that havent been unlocked, solving puzzles. No MMOGs ahve done more than throw a few scraps to those who enjoy such gaming.

As it currently stands, in most games, in order to explore, you have to achieve. In order to kill, you have to achieve. Hell, in order to effectively socialize, you have to achieve. So, in that regard, I agree, fuck the achievers in at least half the game mechanics, because you'd be surprised how few people it actually does affect.

Hey, I know I'd feel and do better if I had a band playing my "theme song" while walking around the office.  I'm going to look into that service.

(http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:ozLZbQo9TD0J:www.geocities.com/fang_club/Sir_robin_part_3_pic.jpg)

Just like this guy!

Yes!  :rock:

Except better.

I fiddled with the Entertainer thing in SWG in the early days - it was a new twist, and I liked making characters that went against the norm, always have. I didn't want that to be the only thing my character did though. So I focused on Mastering a crafting skill, built up a little bit of combat skills, and nearly maxed two lines of Dancer.

I was a Master tailor, that could dance fairly well, and could fight off Womp Rats (barely). The problem was, I actually wanted to experience the game beyond a one mile radius around my home town. Didn't have the combat skills to go anywhere else safely though. At the time, Player cities were ghost towns, cantinas where filled with bots, and trying to run a competetive buisness (without buisness skills - didn't have room for em) was a full time job. It felt like a job too, not a game. So I quit.

I think WoW got one thing right with Fishing and Cooking, in letting everyone do them, but making it a big grind to actually get to the top tiers. Had Entertainer been a skill line that didn't count towards your total limit, I could have actually made a rounded enough character to do more in the game.

Or you could have given us two character slots, and then I would have just made an entertainer Alt :)

I've always thought that social skills (politician, entertainer, crafting) should be separate from adventure skills (kill, stealth, heal).

edit: Meaning two separate skill lines for the same character, so you could be a thief and a musician, for instance. Making them exclusive severely limits player options.

I as well.  That was my biggest complaint with SWG especially since they limited to one char per account.  Once I grew tired of being a ranger, I quit the game because I could go back and forth between other non-combat related classes without screwing up my tree.  As I said, don't force me to do just one thing throughout the game.  I get bored and want to do different things, but don't necessarily want to always start from scratch in doing so.  I'm an alt-a-holic and that really won't change.

Save us Tabula Rasa, you're our only hope!

Apropos of nothing, if you play a Mastermind in CoV you can have one of your minions break out a boombox while everybody else starts fighting. Of course, he doesn't exactly have musician's immunity.

--GF

That's hysterical.

The MIDI idea was shot down for legal reasons. But originally, it was in there, and so was a writer profession so that board-posting-ranter-types could make money IN the game for writing stuff for the in-game Holonet.

It's not hard to think of legal ways to deal with this, especially when you're taking monthly subs from people. However, record companies (and indeed most media companies) have always been reluctant to embrace alternate revenue streams, even when they already have existing payment models and cross-charging from small-scale rebroadcasting licenses. It comes down to the corporate will not being there. So it kind of sucks you got into bed with Sony then. :P

(I bundled those two quotes for a reason)

Because are there examples of successful social spaces today?

What I'm noticing is that the trend is to specialize. Instead of building games that try to reach a wide public and create a virtual world that appeals to different player "types" (we had this discussion long ago (http://www.cesspit.net/drupal/node/230)), we have games that specialize more and more in just one precise direction.

There's a natural and even obligatory drift to focus more and more. On the thread of Grimwell Brad wrote that he thinks it's possible to arrive to a virtual world starting from a Diku and by adding progressively more "world-y" parts and move closer to the ideal. But instead what I see is that both the games, devs and players focus progressively and erode the game to the essential. In DAoC the players focus on PvP and the PvE is more and more left out, despite a decent amount of resources have been spent on it with the time.

What I'm saying is that these games seem to become progressively "poorer", eroded to the minimum common denominator. Specialized and focused as much as possible. I don't think is exclusivelly a matter of the continue optimization done by the players.

The general impression is that a game offers progressively *less* as the time passes. Maybe the focus helps to rise the quality of that specific part but there doesn't seem to exist a possibility to move in the other direction and enrich the game instead of draining/exhausting it.

I'm not sure how to wrap all this up, this is just what I observe. Then I blame the mudflation as always.

Ubiq wrote about this in January (http://www.zenofdesign.com/?p=189) but I think there's more than just marketing observations...

Yes. (http://secondlife.com/)

I do agree that the market in general is heading towards specialization. That's an inevitable part of the marketplace. People will seek out the game that meets what they're looking for, much like they do in any other commercial endeavour. Companies that seek to differentiate themselves will try to find a niche, then be the best at filling it.

I'd argue that the last holistic virtual world was Ultima Online, not so much because of its design (although there are parts of it that haven't been matched yet anywhere else) but because of its place in time. It literally was the only commercial virtual world at its height (not counting M59, which was screwed over by its publisher repeatedly), which meant that it had every possible type of player.

I wrote more about why we probably won't see "the good old days" of UO here (http://www.brokentoys.org/?p=6611), when I was feeling considerably more bitter.

(In unrelated book news, the publication date looks like it slipped to 12/12. Oh well. I did have a coworker paper my office with xeroxed copies of the cover yesterday, so all wasn't lost.)

We will see other holistic virtual worlds. However, they are not going to come from the games divisions of super-sized media companies. As a result, they may take a hit in production qualities, and there's going to be a period of there being nothing on the market. However, they will be back, if for no other reason than because there is a sizable demand for them, no matter how many foozle beaters there are in the world. Divorcing the persistant world online gamers with differing interests from one another by offering breadth in the market will in fact be the very thing that makes holistic virtual worlds possible.

:cry:

 :mob:

You have your own office now? Not just a cube?

It's a cube. But it's a very nice cube. Has real walls and everything.

(I had a real office for years, but moved to a cube so I could work in the same area as the rest of the Camelot team.)

In other news, I had a taco for lunch.

Yeah, you can talk about food here, but don't let us catch you doing that on Sony forums (http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=swggpdiscussion&message.id=34185).

I would have thought that gambling mini games in the catinas in SWG would have big "entertainer" style player draws. How popular were the gambling games in the catinas? From what I'm reading off Google, the Jubilee Wheel and the Lucjaq machine both seem to be single player vs. house style games. Were there any player vs. player gambling games implimented (besides unstructured /roll)?

Hell, TSN: CasinoLand was popular and that was ~14 years ago but I can see how more interactive "gambling" games would have also been shot down by legal.

Entertainers asked for a means of setting up gambling in player cantinas, however it never happened.

There was talk of a Hutt Casino, but that never materialized - and according to one community correspondent was basically shelved due to the piss poor attitude of the Entertainers.  Though, I don't doubt that legal had something to do with it, too.

Either way, nothing more than the Jubilee Wheel (think Roulette) and Lugjack machine (Slot machine) was ever put in the game.

My guild, however, did devise some relatively clever games using the chance cube in-game (red or blue) and the 6, 12, and 100-sided dice in-game.

You basically group up and you can see people's dice rolls.

There is one we called Hyperdice, which resembled craps.  Two 6-sided dice were used (duh).

We also had Galaxy Spin, with a 100-sided die used.  Unlike the Jubilee Wheel, this one allowed for players to make credits off of it from other players, and we of course accepted big bets.  You could bet on Even, Odd, 1-12, 13-24, and 25-36.  Also, individual numbers.  The 100-sided die was rolled until a number between 1 and 36 hit.

Fun games that people enjoyed, but would be nice to have some in-game stuff to work off of.

I tried to resurrect the player casino in our city on Starsider, but opening weekend was the weekend before NGE hit...so everyone was off testing.  The casino's on hiatus now, for an unknown period of time, mainly because our guild has lost several people...some of which were dealers.   :-(  Stupid NGE.

Yes, I was going to specify. Successful social spaces in a mainstream game that hasn't that as main, direct focus. And SL is indeed that (http://www.brokentoys.org/?p=6814).

There are many successful examples in that case (Habbo hotel and similar).

There is a "Fame" system basically done for Entertainers, if they would just put it in. Lets ENtertainers record performances, and sell them to players for short-duration Inspiration buffs, as well as racking up Fame points, which unlock some new content for them. The poor Devs are forced to do things they've GOT to know are crappy for the game.

And instead of making the awesome character diveristy continue in SWG, the Devs are now just making it a clone of WoW. Once your respecs are done, and for anyone new in game, do one thing till you are sick of it, then start over from scratch on something else. I wish the actual people working on the game, coding it and designing it, had been given control of its direction, and enough money to do it. But corporations dont care about that. I think that things like Theory of Fun *could* have worked, had anyone upstaris had the balls to do it. SWG would have been a landmark giant in the industry instead of a joke. And it isn't getting revived by NGE.

Well, he's done it again.  I'm confused.

After reading the linked blog entry I thought this:

Being able to blow up furry orgies with IED's while sniping the dazed survivors with armor piercing rounds makes me want to play SL...  It can't be that cool can it?

Meh, fan shman. 

I'd like to say that I appreciate your work.  I particularly wish SWG hadn't morphed into the current situation and had stayed true to expanding content and promoting communities.  But I guess there's a little Alice in all of us and the reality of corporations doesn't always support dreams.  Anyway, your work on SWG introduced me into a different way to view gaming, and is appreciated.