Just as with last year, I jotted off a few quick thoughts on the year in MMO trends. The result is up on Gamasutra, again as with year. Simon’s insistence on the ‘MMO expert’ title makes me feel a bit like a talking head, but still …

For one more special bonus, guest MMO expert Michael Zenke takes a look at the year’s five most compelling trends in online gaming. The world of MMOs is an enormous business and huge opportunity for the game development community at large. As a fast-growing and influential part of the industry, ripples in MMO development will have serious consequences in the rest of the pond down the line.

Here are the biggest stories of 2008 in online gaming, so you can know what to look out for next year.

Been a bit of an unproductive week, for some reasons I’m not going to go into here but did go into on my personal site. Still, I did get two pieces out that you might appreciate.

The Z-Axis: ‘Extending Pure Moments With G&T’ -

So the World of Warcraft thing was interesting but ultimately didn’t offer the kind of traction that Simon was looking for – completely understandable. Instead, I’m going to jump into a weekly/bi-weekly offering about the passtime of gaming in general. This first offering talks about the extension of ‘pure moments’ that games tend towards nowadays. I use the recent Penny Arcade game as an example, because … well, because it’s so good.

This is How I Roll (my d20) -

It’s always fun to talk about pen and paper gaming in a public place. The GWJ guys were nice enough to offer me a place to nestle some words, and so I did. Rabbit seemed to particularly enjoy this: “Running a game isn’t a task I take lightly. Coordinating these strange blends of murder simulator, poker night, and drama club can get hectic.”

Funny title, probably a useless article to you. But still … I try.

Even with the help of other players, making it to the top is long road. That journey is one to be enjoyed, as leveling a character in WoW is (for many people) the real game. That said, once you have your first character at max level, retaking those same steps to the top can be frustrating. Going over the same content for the second, third, fourth time is just never quite the same.

Today we have on offer a few simple tools to help you make it through ‘the grind’ in a reasonable amount of time with minimal hair-pulling. Some of these are technical in nature, some are simple techniques, and some are simple platitudes that we’ve found helpful in the past. Read on, and make sure to grasp the handrail tightly up the escalator.

This week’s WoWE is all about the people behind the behemoth:

Day after day, hundreds of thousands of people across the globe play Blizzard’s ridiculously popular game. It’s kind of awe-inspiring to think about, the sheer number of humans all inhabiting the same virtual space.

Most are content to enjoy the experience of leveling up a character, raiding with their friends, or engaging in Player vs. Player combat. Some, simply by their actions or position in life, stand out of the crowd. Their influence has changed the face of the game, and in some cases shaped the game itself.

The word player, of course, can have more than one meaning. In this case, we’re talking about the movers and shakers that have made Azeroth what it is today. From literal individuals on the Blizzard development team, to player-run organizations, to other massively multiplayer games entirely many hands have shaped World of Warcraft’s success.

Yeah, yeah, lore is fluff. But a lot of people (myself included, actually) find WoW’s backstory kind of interesting.  I certainly agree with David’ assessment over at Timesink – WoW has more compelling lore than EQ2 as an example.

I am fully aware that a lot of this is completely subjective, and people’s opinions will vary. I love EverQuest II, it’s a great game, but when compared to WoW, EQII does not feel like a “world” as oppsed to a bunch of loosely connected zones. I’m not criticizing EQII’s use of zoning, that never really bothered me, rather, EQII’s zones feel like zones. They feel like arbitrary areas created to adventure in with no connection or relation to any other parts, nor do they evoke any sense of historical importance.

I try to unravel the complicated threads of the Alliance racial backstories in my weekly WoW Exposed column for GameSetWatch.

While sci-fi’s played-out tropes have been rehashed and thinned down somewhat in recent years, we haven’t had a truly great genre shake-up for fantasy fans. The result is that even World of Warcraft, as successful and entertaining as it is, bogs down with an endless amount of backstory and genre cliches. Despite that, the lore of Warcraft is interesting stuff. There are a lot of compelling elements, individual tales that you can follow along through the thousands of years of sketched out storyline.

If you ignore the clap-trap about who specifically did what when or the endless back-and-forth between all-powerful entities, there are interesting characters and situations to focus on. Consider this the first in an ongoing series of articles looking at the backstory of Warcraft, with an eye towards making the material as approachable as possible.

My third post in the World of Warcraft exposed column jumps up and down on the machinima genre till stuff comes out of its tearducts. I tried to make it a bit more than just “look at the funny videos”. Please judge for yourself.

Societal norms, language, and even art forms all evolve from the interaction of so many creative individuals in one ‘space.’ World of Warcraft is no exception to this rule, and in fact the artistic culture surrounding WoW may be the most deep and varied of any online society.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the wildly successful ‘machinima’ scene surrounding the game. Machinima, the art of creating a film entirely within a gamespace, has been popularized in general gaming culture by work in the Halo games. These works are primarily humorous in nature, typified by the wildly popular Red vs. Blue series. For World of Warcraft players, machinima has grown to fill many roles; humor is often a part of the experience, but drama, instruction, passion play, bragging, and a number of other motivations fill YouTube with a host of Azerothian films.

I have a double dose of external me-links today. On GameSetWatch my second weekly World of Warcraft column has gone up – this one a sort of pre-newbie guide. It looks at the races and classes in the game with an eye towards trying to explain the *rationale* for playing a character – IE, why you’d want to play a Blood Elf, or what kind of play style the Paladin class supports.

There are so many people playing World of Warcraft today, it’s almost a joke. At game conferences it’s almost become a sort of mini-game: “Who’s the most obscure person in your life playing WoW?” One guy I spoke to at GDC this year pretty much won the game forever by claiming that his mom and her hairstylist had a gripping conversation about questing in the zone of Westfall while a perm set. WoW’s widespread playerbase is a direct result of the game’s accessible gameplay, a topic we discussed in last week’s column.

Despite that highly-regarded accessibility, there are still a number of things you should keep in mind when jumping into World of Warcraft for the first time. While Blizzard’s monolith is much better than other MMOs when it comes to making irreversible decisions, there are still many important choices you have to make at character creation. Today we’ll run down the most important things you need to keep in mind before you ever set foot into Azeroth. We’ll discuss class roles, racial benefits, servers and transfers, and (an ever-important element to RPGs) the question of motivation. Read on, and then get rolling.

I know, I know – this seems very off-topic for me. It was also noted in the comments for the last post that there have been *just* a few articles on this subject matter. I concur – but I also think that there’s room in the medium for a very broad approach to the game. Besides … this is fun! It’s really nice being able to write these up on a subject matter I know so well. That base let me really put some thought into what could have been just a toss off. (3000+ words is not a toss off for me, trust me.)

Anyway, hope you find it at least vaguely interesting.