Search Results for:

multiplayer

September 25th

multiplayer games and management simulations.

  • Banished: It Takes a Village to Raise a Surplus | Play The Past Gilles Roy traces the history of management of surplus as reflected in city-building and survival games, asking what happens when methods of control become modes of play.
  • Gamasutra: Daniel Don Nilsen’s Blog – Community building economics Daniel Don Nielsen gives a behavioural economics argument for investing in community management.
  • Gamasutra: Matthew McCaffrey’s Blog – Virtual Worlds, Real Economics Matthew McCaffrey describes human behaviour in economic terms to demonstrate that game play is an economic activity.

October 23rd

…for newcomers who want to understand and support their children’s hobby.

  • Stopping and Sitting – Haywire Magazine Josh Trevett examines the charming contradiction of character emotes that suggest inactivity.
  • “Sitting is a natural fit for the largest scale multiplayer games because of the nature of those environments. They’re filled with genuine life, real people roaming hither and yon in pursuit of their various purposes. Such a social space would feel uncanny if everybody were always standing and always busy with something; to take the time to sit, alone or with others, in the city or in…

    TWIVGB style guide

    …a major topic in games criticism, and there is still much work to be done, through proactive interventions and critical reflection.

  • Sociality | Critical Distance How do people involved in interactive media interact with each other? What kind of social structures are we designing when we design games? This is a topic of interest to sociologists, community managers, and anyone with a stake in multiplayer gaming.
  • If you want, you can replace a blockquote with an embedded video, or an image, or a gallery of images. Senior Curator Zoyander Street is particularly keen on images, because…

    December 10th

    …background within a platform game.

  • The slow disappearing act of Demon’s Souls | Eurogamer.net Christian Donlan discusses the forthcoming loss of multiplayer functions in the iconic From Software title, with reference to an essay by Max Campbell on the decomposing works of 19th century pioneer of photography William Henry Fox Talbot.
  • “Sometimes, you get to see a picture as it is in the process of disappearing, and you get to play a game as some of its features are removed. These things retain a power, but it’s a new kind of power.”

    Quintessentially postmodern

    January 28th

    …highlight design strategies and define emotional and aesthetic outcomes for players.

  • Playing with Money (1): The Adventurer Shop – ihobo Chris explores the history of merchants in RPGs, and traces their changing significance as they moved from tabletop to videogames.
  • Everything I learned about game design last year I learned from Dead by Daylight – Eurogamer.net Keith Stuart finds remarkable opportunities for role-play in a multiplayer horror game without an AI enemy – and has stories to tell about beautiful moments emerging from player improv.
  • They Are Billions: Steampunk, Colonialism and the Undead – Paste Playing a…
  • Dark Souls

    …with others that a game can be obscured entirely behind it.”. Similarly, In “Here With Me”, Brendan Keogh finds the “sensation of an overwhelmingly supportive community helping each other” both within and without Dark Souls delineated multiplayer. Both Patrick Klepek and C.T Casberg also ruminate on the joys of jolly cooperation .

    Undead Burg – Ladders to Nowhere (On Art and Architecture)

    For many of us, the revelatory relief of rediscovering the Undead Burg bonfire after narrowly avoiding dragon fire on that scorched bridge represents something fundamental to Dark Souls. It’s a moment where the twisting, interlocking nature…

    May 20th

    …games of the era and removed their soul, smashing them together into unholy [F]rankenstein that with an almost self-aware cynicism seemed to ask the audience: is this enough? The answer, of course, was yes.”

    Looks At The Industry and Culture

    A variety of articles from all across the field look at the here-and-now in multiplayer and money.

    • Losing Players Is The Best Thing to Happen to Sea of Thieves | Polygon Cass Marshal argues that “The fair-weather fans have all left the game, and it’s the best thing that could have happened.”
    • Games and…

    August 29th

    …slowly plowing through it these past few weeks, and I’ve been enjoying it. I’ve also been watching many, many Starcraft II replay videos. Together, I think they’re helping me understand something about the role that story sometimes plays in multiplayer-enabled RTSes. Both campaigns and replay commentaries serve, in part, the exact same purpose. They’re translations.

    David Carlton takes a stab at answering the question ‘What is it you see in social games?’, and David is probably as good a person as any to attempt an answer as his day job involves developing social games for Playdom. However he’s…

    Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

    March 13th

    …about ‘How To: Commune’ [mirror] in Multiplayer Minecraft.

    Responding to the Tom Bissell / Simon Ferrari back-and-forth on Paste a few weeks ago, Patrick Holleman at The Game Design Forum discusses ‘The Architecture of Dreams’ (which sounds like it could be about Inception, but it isn’t).

    Brendan Caldwell at The Shore blog writes about, well, a dream or hypothetical situation in which he tells the UK Prime Minister David Cameron a joke about a Human, a Turian and a Salarian. ‘From Here to Eternity‘. Mass Effect and The Real World collide.

    Okay, so I’m super duper conflicted…

    January 6th

    …with you even once you stop. There’s a constant ebb and flow of moments when you can play and can’t, and your mind tends to fill in the spaces you can’t with the echoes of when you could.”

    Soulcial Searching

    The world of 2019 sort of sucks–okay it sucks pretty bad–and correspondingly more games writers are thinking about how we and the games we play fit in with everyone else trying to ride out the hellscape. This week’s five selections think through this question along axes of multiplayer, class, mentality, social media, and fandom.

    • How…