Friday at the Austin Game Conference

This year's AGC is now at an end, and several sites have coverage of the last day's events. The hit event for the day seemed to be Damion Schubert's Moving Beyond Men in Tights talk. MMORPG.com has a slew of interesting articles, covering Emerging PR Strategies for MMOGs, Running Your Own MMOG, and Rich Vogel on MMOG Betas. Raph has a liveblog on a session about Virtual Economies, and finally the 3pointD site has a look at a panel on Virtual Worlds. Interesting stuff. From the 'Men in Tights' writeup: "The queston to answer, why do we keep making grindtastic classbased combat oriented men in tights gamey games? I'm not going to answer 'because it sells' because it's a circular argument and a copout. We won't get anywhere if we only do what was done before. Instead, I'll ask why do we need a grind, why do games appear to be winning, why are classes good, and so on. The reason to tackle this is because whenever people decide to make a new game, these are often the first five things people choose to innovate on. But there's a lot of bad innovation from people trying to solve these five problems."

l like having experts figure what I want to play

[gwjenkins]

Like a lot of slashdotters I've quit WoW to salvage my real life. For the last few months I've been busy downloading and trying a variety of mmogs trying to find some methadone. These articles show there's a lot of folk out there trying to cater to my needs! I like that a lot (because I haven't figured out what my needs are yet). Damion Schubert's Moving Beyond Men in Tights [raphkoster.com] talk has some nice ideas, "You don't need fantasy but you need an inviting world. People want to spend their spare time here. This is

Why fantasy is winning...

[teflaime]

There are, I think, two reasons that fantasy games are the big draws in MMORPGs right now...First, the biggest movies and book series for the "mainstream" challenged amongst us, of recent times, have been fantasies: Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Wheel of Time, Star Wars (yes, Star Wars is a fantasy, even it if has blaster rifles). People have already been immersed in these worlds, so the fantasy world is familiar to them. Which makes them comfortable and easy to get in to. Second, Computer games really

*gasp*

[S1LK]

"the game needs to reward devotion more than skill."

i think that sums up the biggest problem right there, its the reason most people I used to play with have quit WoW. I dont want to seem niave, I mean, its a buisness and this is the strategy they chose to ensure future profits. Unfortunatly, it is what makes rationalizing non-play easiest. /sigh

More To It....

[Atomm]

It really has nothing to do with copying each other, even though it does seem that way. It really is about Intellectual Property's ability to reach an audience.

For example, Eve Online and Anarchy Online. When I hear those names, I know nothing about them. In order to experience the story line, I have to find a reason to jump into the game. This is a huge hurdle for the game and one of the reasons why they are offering Free Trials and even Free Play with Ads in the case of AO. They need something to suck you