Bartle’s List:

• Edward Castronova
• Raph Koster
• Jessica Mulligan
• Jake Song
• Roy Trubshaw

Matt’s List:

• Rob Pardo
• Timo Soininen
• Jun Zhu
• Andrew Gower

My List: (keeping in mind that Raph, Jessica Mulligan, and Rob Pardo are ‘taken’.)

• Richard Garriot - Cuz that Ultima Online thing was kinda important. All respect to Meridian 59 and Brian Green, but UO caused something of a stir with the massive and the multiplayer and the whatnot and the hey. A bunch of the crankiest of current Massive commentators are still quietly talking about the days pre-Trammel under their breath, in one way or another. If nothing else, the Ultima series got a lot of other people into the business in the first place. Heck, he was even the victim of one of the earliest well-documented griefings.
  
• Nick Yee - Nick has overcome personal hardship, sweated, toiled, and cried … all to tell us which age group is most likely to participate in gender play. Nick’s research is not only fascinating and well done, it’s compelling stuff. Via the player essays he takes in, it’s also deeply personal and always worth reading.
• Richard Bartle - Hah! Easy one. I suppose he sort of ‘goes without saying’, which is why he’s not on Matt’s list, but I very much think he’s worth mentioning. Above and beyond his work with Roy Trubshaw, he kind of wrote the book on the subject of making massives. He’s an engaging speaker, a funny guy and intelligent guy, and a personal inspiration. Well deserving of ‘most important’ status.
  
• Hiromichi Tanaka - One of the driving forces behind Final Fantasy XI, that ‘other’ really popular subscription-based Massively Multiplayer game. FFXI is incredibly important and (I feel) too often overlooked by western gamers. They have top-notch customer service, an amazing events team, the game is now on (PS2/360/PC) three separate platforms … and we owe a lot of thanks to Tanaka for all of that.
  
• John Smedley - So he’s done some unpopular stuff. Some gamers think he’s the closest thing Massive games have to a great Satan. And yet … SOE is profitable, pulling in more games via Platform Publishing and Station Access, and is branching out into F2P titles. I’d say that’s pretty important.

So … who is on your list?

Last week’s Massive Update ended up kind of feeling like a blog post here. No big news to report, so I whipped out one of my favorite things to do(tm): making a posit and then asking for opinions.

As an exercise, I’m going to run through five high concept ideas for inclusion in a massive game. Feel free to look through the big list of hardcore idea, at Lum’s comments, my own list, and pipe up in the comments with what you’d like to see in a future game. Heck, maybe you’d like to see something added to a game you already play? Permadeath in World of Warcraft, perhaps?

It was (obviously) a further riff on the post put up by Lum on idealized features. I’ve been thinking about that one a lot, actually. Thinking about it, a lot of the stuff that I and other people ‘want’ out of a Massive game is common sense stuff. Even my list (episodic stories, a way to ‘win’, etc.) are all things we’ve talked about here since I put up the site.

And yet, a lot of the features I think of as gang-buster-awesome (in as-yet-unreleased games) are things that came out of left field. I’m really looking forward to playing Gods and Heroes for the first time, and the minion system is a big bump from Guild Wars’ cohorts. The quest variants coming in Warhammer are certainly not out of nowhere, but even at first blush they have a number of nuances I haven’t heard anywhere else. Who could have prognosticated the ship-to-ship combat of Pirates of the Burning Sea?

I don’t really like surprises, but I’m thinking that this whole thing where people get paid to surprise us as gamers? That’s pretty awesome. Keep up the good work.

As an aside, I was a guest on Darren’s Shut Up We’re Talking podcast. Please excuse the poor audio quality; it was raining on the internet that night

Tobold and Tipa have had lists of desired feature, while Lum laughs at a general one and Angus laughs at Lum. I’m kinda-sorta with Mark on all this finger-pointing: I think we have it pretty good nowadays. Most people want to play WoW, it seems, and that’s cool. There are going to be WoW clones launched in the next five years; many of them will be poorly done. You can launch an orcs n’ elves game without being WoW, though; WAR is definitely not going to be WoW, again.

I’m with a lot of the other bloggers insofar as wanting some different things out there. However, I think I’m in the minority by thinking that things are pretty much going okay. Not only do we have it pretty good right now, we’ve got it pretty good coming down the pipe. Today I want to lay out why now is such a great time for MMOGing, and why folks who want ’something different’ have absolutely no reason to complain about the future.

Read more

Hemlock’s Tuesday Night Noob Club has drawn Nightfall to a close.  Nicely done, sir.

Five months later, we’ve done it, and are goddamned heroes. Perhaps this was always how MMOs were meant to be - a modern day analogue for the days of sitting around a table with friends, pizza and pointy dice? I’ve really enjoyed it, and this probably isn’t the end of it all. After a bit of a break, the Tuesday N00b Club will return…in Guild Wars: Factions…

Meanwhile, over at this week’s Escapist, Sanya throws out a piece that resonates with me in a number of ways. I imagine the reasons are fairly obvious. Tweety’s Song is the story of Sanya Weathers’ voyage from opinionated blog maven to the icon of community management.

At some point, I felt the urge to give back to the gaming community, and I volunteered to provide customer service. These days, this concept strikes people as ridiculous, but at the turn of the century, in order to be the front line of customer service, you either had to train in Bangalore for six intensive months before being allowed near a phone, or you could do what I did and answer a questionnaire. After weeks of not communicating with an actual company employee, weeks spent soaking up abuse from angry people, I snapped. I wrote out a rant and found myself laughing. I polished that little rant until it shined and posted it on my favorite EQ message board. I called myself Tweety.

All of these posts are very much worth your time.

I don’t talk much about Second Life here for a variety of reasons. I think it’s sufficient to say that it’s not really what I’m looking for in an online experience. Just the same, despite the bad stuff I have tried very hard to keep an open mind because the idea, at least, is a good one. Scott Jennings regularly has good stuff to say, but today as I was reading Broken Toys he actually made me understand 2L for the first time … a little.

As someone told me explicitly, in these exact words, “In Second Life, men tend to become worse, and women tend to become better.” Freed of their concern for their appearance, age, and RL social status, women take to SL with relish and feed off of each other positively. Most of the most dramatic areas in SL are female-owned. It’s been known through studies that middle-aged women tend to be the social hubs in MMOs - in a social MMO like SL, this becomes raised to the Nth degree. It’s alien to almost anything online that’s come before, and I suspect that alienness - that singularity - is what inspires SL’s most fervently myopic defenders to tilt at the wheel again and again. Because in spite of the flailing newbies, crashing platform and constant drama - this is something that SL’s partisans want to see remain. It’s what is missed in most media coverage, and it’s what the partisans are terrified may go away, washed away in a tsunami of media backlash, moral judgement and clueless administration.

The 9th installment of Massive Update was a day late because, well, there was a crapton of stuff to link to. E3 week and all that, even though it’s not really E3 anymore. I think the smaller scale is pretty cool, but if it means that Massive gamers don’t get to see their toys during the week that’s kind of a poor tradoff. Crysis and Killzone 2 and Mario Galaxy and Mass Effect are fine and dandy … but what about my Blizzard/SOE/Arena.net/Mythic/NCSoft/Cryptic loving? And when the hell is Bioware going to announce their *cough*KOTOR*cough*?

The big story this week is, of course, E3. Specifically, the story is that there is no story. Despite copious new details on already announced products, nothing earth-shattering was revealed by any of the massively multiplayer developers in Santa Monica. Of course, Sony’s revelation that it’s signed up to work with NCSoft on future projects is good to hear. I think Guild Wars would work well on the PlayStation 3. Just the same, it’s hard to get worked up over a business deal with no details. It’s a sign of future fun, but nothing to chew on.

The story here is that, at least for massive players, E3 just ain’t what she used to be. As followers of ongoing projects, we’re used to the slow trickle of information this event represents. While it’s nice to have some more details on games like Aion: Tower of Eternity or expansions like Wings of the Goddess, it doesn’t feel that special getting this information this particular week. MMOG players are used to the slow drip of information — the anticipation of even the tiniest shred of data about the game you’re following. Veteran MMOG hags are nothing if not patient; camping spawns will do that to you.

People have been nice things about my work, and I wanted to make sure to thank them. Van Hemlock gave the Massive Update a big shout-out on his blog, and it’s very much appreciated. It’s been great to see an overwhelmingly positive reaction to a concerted effort at covering Massive news on a mass-market site; getting a thumbs-up from someone whose opinion you respect is all the more gratifying.

Sez Hemlock:

Of course this is partly shameless reciprocal backslapping backlinking, as he seems to link to yours truly on an alarmingly frequent basis, down there in the ‘What People Are Blogging About’ bit, but also I can’t help be impressed at an objective level, as these weekly roundups seem to contain staggeringly comprehensive and detailed lists of pretty much everything that’s gone on in almost every MMO during the week; news, updates, patch notes, the lot - along with podcasting and blogging notes too. I can only imagine how much work this must take, and hope a nervous breakdown isn’t in the post.

I’m trying to make the blog/podcasting sections of the Update kinda egalitarian, but they’re usually the last part of the post I do; as such I go for quality. The best win out, and Hemlock is definitely one of the best. I’m hoping along the same lines with the nervous breakdown. Keeping track of that much stuff … can get grating.

And, of course, this week is E3. :D

He mentions having troubling permalinking to the posts, which is odd, but if you’re wanting to follow the post series, I would refer you to my 1up page or the Massive Update topic here on MMOG Nation. Both of these should be running references to the articles as they go up on the 1up site.

More locally, Dan Dormer over at the Videogame Media Watch site was nice enough to include me on a list of his top gaming blog picks. The list was prompted by MTV Games’ list, which Dan thought overlooked a couple of people.

About the site, he says:

To go a little more off the beaten path, let me recommend MMOG Nation, penned by Slashdot’s Michael Zenke. Focusing solely on MMO titles, Michael does a wonderful job going in-depth on issues surrounding a number of virtual worlds. With only a passing interest in some of the games he discusses, I still find myself reading each post because of the passion he has for the topics.

I guess I should “Hi Dan!”, and thanks for thinking of the site. :)

Some of his other picks are much more must-read than mine, of course, and if you don’t follow GamePolitics, GameSetWatch, LevelUp, and Game|Life, I highly recommend them.