Syp was one of the many, many people to write a post aimed at my interview with Richard Bartle at Massively. Unlike most of those other people, though, Syp followed that up with a post clarifying Dr. Bartle’s responses. In the face of clarification, Sype’s own reaction is very well-thought out.

“I agree that we’re on the same side of wanting MMOs to improve and jump forward, but I think you’re being far too harsh on the current crop of games in an industry that is still in its baby phase. Evolutionary development is how most forms of entertainment grow — the movie industry had a few revolutionary jumps, but by and large, most of it was evolutionary in nature … Why this irks us in the Warhammer community is that it appeared as if you were quickly dismissive of WAR as having the “same old patterns” without taking into account the features and style of gameplay that has either never been done before or has been done poorly in this field — the Tome of Knowledge, Realm vs. Realm conflict, Public Quests, Living Cities, Living Guilds, etc.”

This was some great blogging, Syp. I added the Waagh blog to my blogroll just last week, and this week I’m really glad I did.

Even as I write this, I’m cutting across the roads and fields of Azeroth on my warstrider, enjoying one of my favorite things in all of World of Warcraft: The town-and-city-based treasure hunt. The one you might be most familiar with is the Lunar Festival, which sees players scouring the world for departed and beloved ancestors.

This year’s Midsummer Festival (which I’m really loving) has players traveling the paths to honor or desecrate (alternately) the celebratory bonfires of their faction and the opposing one. I took a few minutes and planned out my entire route through the world. Any time spent on something like that has to get used *somewhere* right? So below is my lengthy route from Silvermoon alllll the way through to Area 52. I’m a hordie, of course, so this route might not be so useful for Allies.

Catch you on the road! /wave

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I’m trying to decide if this is funny, or dumb. It’s right on the line and I can’t precisely tell. Can you help me?

The first real landmark in the MMOG Nation Broadcast’s history accompanies a unique recording from my visit at EA Mythic. During my visit to Virginia I had a chance to chat with Paul Barnett about this and that, an experience I found most engaging and amusing. Carrie Gouskos, the designer on Warhammer’s Tome of Knowledge, joined us near the end of the discussion to add her unique insights to the conversation. Paul was nice enough to let me record it all to share with you. We talk about Warhammer, the process of making games, and the value of strong ideas. Check it out in Episode 10.

Unfortunately this podcast also requires a bit of explanation because of how it needed to be edited.

- At one point early in the podcast there’s an abrupt cut; Paul received a phone call.
- Near the middle I say something like “I want to know about the cards”, which seems very random. Earlier I’d been shown that the folks making Warhammer are playing some sort of meta-game involving a deck of cards. Employees can apparently accomplish goals / do things that can earn them cards. I wasn’t told what the rules or purpose of the game was - indeed, I’m only theorizing that there *is* a game, because no details at all were shared with me as an outsider.
- Paul randomly pulled Carrie into the room for that quick Q&A session, which is why she sort of appears spontaneously in the room.
- The loud noise at the end was Paul and I putting the piece of the Blokus game away; sorry about that.

To be honest I’m a bit nervous about this one because I’m not sure this is interesting to anyone that’s not me. Shawn did all the editing here, so my hope is the end product is interesting to a broader audience. I really need feedback on this one though: did you enjoy it? Let me know.

Related links:
Massively Goes to WAR
Paul Barnett Face the Nation Recap
Carrie’s View of my article about her Tome

Music:
God Save the Queen

In honor of the tenth MMOG Nation Broadcast featuring Paul Barnett, I thought it would be worthwhile to link back to my first discussion with Mr. Barnett. In one of my first ‘Face the Nation’ interviews last year, Paul and I chat very obliquely about Warhammer but - moreover - talk about almost everything else.

Part One focuses on Paul’s background and the inspiration for making games:

MN: The next more serious question I have is, moving the game back out until next year: that seems like an obvious, intelligent thing to do. But, can you give us some insight into what the decision-making process was there?

Paul: Yes, it’s about FARTs.

In Part Two the bulk of our time is spent talking about the role of designers in the games industry, and the wankery of both:

Paul: Let’s stop talking about C++, let’s stop talking about our new clever way of doing a design, and let’s start talking about the fact that we earn quite a lot of money, that we pay the bills, that we’re interesting people, that we’ve got a career, that you can do it, that we can all do it. And if we all work together, we can have a bloody good laugh. And! Mom will be impressed.

Part Three caps off with some discussion of class balance:

Paul: Ninety percent of the people playing Class A have no idea that they were unbalanced. They had no idea that they were cheating. They had no idea that they were having an easy run of it. All of a sudden they log in and find that their character’s crap. Their character is crap, and yet they did nothing to justify that. They were just paying you money, and playing the game. But because some la-di-da clever designer went and read the message boards, and found out that four people playing Class A were able to kill the dragon “Sparklers” while walking backwards waving fish, these people suddenly have their characters crippled.

To listen to the whole thing as audio, check out the (somewhat poor-quality) recording.

Yesterday I had a sort of throw-away thought bubble article over at Gamers With Jobs, and pulled together two things I generally enjoy thinking about: Massively Multiplayer Games and the design/production elements of the Disney corporation. To be fair: I know it’s weird that I spend time thinking about things like resort design, ride queues, and theming … but I do. /shrug

I love Disney. Not the company, which is increasingly reaching to foul and loathesome depths in its push to get marketoys into the hands of little girls. Not even the man, though obviously he was a person to respect. I love Disney the gestalt, the overall combination of customer service, ambition, creativity and innovation that lets places like the happiest place on earth exist. Their Walt Disney World resort in particular is fascinating, a microcosm of a country all within the space of a few former swampy marshes.

Particularly engaging is the idea that - in almost every way - Disney is the ultimate MMO developer. Though their forays into the genre have been tentative so far, the house of mouse is poised to be the designer of the happiest places on meta-earth as well.

I was noodling around the internets for something today and I remembered to look up Carrie Gouskos’ blog. She’s the (fantastic) Tome of Knowledge designer with the EA Mythic folks, hard at work on Warhammer Online. She used to be a Gamespotter before she jumped into the design field, and so she knows the interview gig from both sides of the chair. She paid me a tremendous compliment in a blog post at the end of last month, which I will share with you now:

I have to say this week I gave probably my favorite interview ever to Mike from Massively. Instead of asking me to rehash the features in the Tome (he had done his homework), he wanted me to talk about passion and emotion in game development. He wanted me to talk about Xbox 360 achievement points. I think his concept for that article serves the fans in a lot more ways than simply a bullet point of feature items we’re working on and whether or not *I* think they’re going to be cool. To me, it feels like that’s the kind of conversation you should be having at preview time, what are the developers working on and what are their objectives? Who are they trying to attract and how have they accomplished it? Even using in-game examples to show off how they’re achieving those goals. Leave the excessive use of adjectives and the KILLING MY SOUL for the reviews.

Every once in a while somebody says something that makes all of this worth it. Thanks, Carrie.