Games are software

tnx~!~

One of the topics I wanted to graze was the boundary between software and game. Obviously "design" is a bit of an overloaded term and can mean game design just as easily as software design – and the two aren't always in harmony. I think the conversation about RPG conventions butts up against that pretty hard. There are some software conventions (usability comes first) that butt up against game conventions (you don't want every sniper shot to be successful, you don't want arrows to seem better than swords). For what it's worth, Mass Effect 2 did away with a *lot* of RPG conventions and to be quite honest worked very well and was rewarded commercially and critically for it. But MMO audiences tend to be a lot more reactionary imo (At another panel, someone mentioned the term "welfare epics" used in WoW to indicate anger over distribution of items.)

"Realism, as usual, is simply a fig leaf for doing what you want" – http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=10077

i guess the other point would be re:barriers – every successful company of the past 5 years (Apple, Google, to some extent still Microsoft, Youtube, Facebook) have looked at barriers and said "we can do better, even though people think we can't". That's what irritates me about people rejecting farmville out of hand because they personally don't like it – it demonstrates an ignorance of where business is heading, what new frontiers are being claimed.

also as an additional lol: one of the comments on the post you linked to "people who care such as myself are being drowned out by the pedestrians — the casual gamers. These people care little about the rules; they are just here to have a good time. That is what MMOs have been reduced to." PERFECT EXAMPLE OF WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT. Following his profile link to his webpage I found a series entitled "The emasculation of the MMO". but, you know, the fight against casual gamers has nothing to do with gender. emasculation can refer to girls too!

Well done.

"The only reason we accept such terrible, convoluted, impossible, horrible design choices is because we all lived through the evolution of games. We adapted to it, and now we perpetuate it. Now that Farmville has reduced us back to a mouse move + click, we’ve got nothing."

That reminds me of a post I read yesterday at Elder Game re: conventions of the MMO genre: http://www.eldergame.com/2010/09/being-aware-of-genre-conventions/ I disagree with Eric's conclusion that good design can ignore convention without harming market share, but he makes a lot of good points and I think there's a lot of synergy with your argument re: social games.

You do a great job of outlining the barriers to access that gaming has constructed around itself. These kinds of barriers are insidious: they are all but invisible to people on the inside, while the people on the outside lack the language to articulate the means of their exclusion. The only way to gain the language is to be included, at which point the barriers become invisible.

This phenomenon is very similar to access issues faced by libraries: identifying barriers to collections access is a huge challenge, because the people designing and refining the policies / procedures / tools have already ingested the existing scheme as a functional system.

As you outline so well, Farmville eliminates many of gaming's traditional barriers. At the same time, it's creating new barriers. Gamers who are used to being on the inside suddenly find themselves on the outside, and they end up saying things like the panel questions you quoted above. Fascinating!