Jane Pinckard of gamegirladvance.com moderates.

Sheri Graner Ray is game designer currently working for Sony as a lead designer on unannounced MMORPG. She’s written a book about designing games that appeal to both sexes. She says that the market is focused on males 15-25, but that demographic isn’t growing as quickly as the game industry itself is. So, the industry has to learn to skew wider.

James Au is the official blogger for the game SecondLife. The player can create her own landscapes. He calls it a Massively Multiplayer Massive Online Creative Agora. He also writes for Wired and Salon. He shows impressive events and scenes created by users, including a Viennese formal ball. Slides are here. [Hmm, I just realized that I carped about something Au wrote about Doom 3 a while ago.]

He shows a character created by a homeless person. Is that true? Even if it’s not, says Au, it’s an interesting narrative the woman created for herself…blurring the line between avatars and people.

He also shows a slide of Cory’s avatar holding an online book forum in the world.

Ray: We’re all asking if we’re making a sandbox or making a game.

Au: There was a tax revolt in our world. The game used to deduct virtual bucks depending on how much property you own. One person created a protest parade of rats.

Ray: In the social organizations within these worlds, they tend to be led by females and they tend to be the glue that holds the group together. They’re also the ones who externalize the game and take it outside the game, running the web sites, doing the fan fiction…

Au: One woman, Jesse, created herself as the premier hostess. She set up a villa in the designated war zone, told the combatants they were being rude. She got a gun. She scared them because she had a lot of “social power.” [I don’t know what sociala power means in this game, and they’re not taking questions yet.]

Q: What about player-killers, griefers, i.e., those who are there to cause mischief.

Ray: They’re actually playing against the developers, finding the loopholes. We spend a disproportionate amount of time figuring out how to handle them. And we consider them from the gitgo.

The questioner (Mike from Disney) says that there did used to be vigilante players who would police the area, but that got squashed by the developers.

Ray: It wasn’t enough. So we had to step in and try to make the experience friendly to new players.

Ray: Players are perverse. “Why are you trying to put the tree in your backpack?” But they’ll do it. In one of the games I play, they put in beds. Players immediately stacked them to climb up on things they weren’t meant to climb up on.

Au: We had a war zone, but people started building there. Homesteaders were being shot. And that puts you where you started, so they’d be transported back into the war zone and they’d be shot again. So, they took three of the properties and eliminated the war gaming there.

Au: Someone created a game within a game and charges people to play it. And he retains all the IP to the game.

Ray: We like to see where our players are going and then build it in. We’ll watch the boards. What are they talking about? That’s what we’ll fold back into our stories.

Ray: I’d like to see great sandboxes.

Au: Uru [Myst 4, I think] shut down [It promised playuuer-created narratives], so players are recreating it in SecondLife.

Q: Some parts of the world are gorgeous, but some parts look ugly. How do you control that?

Au: Some people agreed to create their dream community and created criteria. They have community meetings.

Q: What will happen as the consoles go online?

Ray: Console titles will go online the way Halo did: The controls lend themselves to twitch games. They won’t be willing to pay a monthly fee because they can go online and play for free.

Q: Online games have become like work.

A: We could spend hours on that! Make the treadmill fun. Eliminate the treadmill. If they’re using a macro, we should do it for them.

Categories: Uncategorized dw