Game Notes

Scott McCloud, in his comic strip about games (“Discovering Games”) in the March Computer Gaming World, quotes game designer Doug Church:

Our desire to create traditional narratives and exercise authorial control over the gaming world often inhibits the players’ ability to involve themselves with the gaming world.

Exactly the same is true of businesses presenting themselves on the Web. The more they exercise control over their site, the less involving (or even useful) it is for visitors. All but a handful of business sites make this mistake. They view think their site is for them. Which is why we don’t care about them.

The “Shadows of Luclin” add-on to the online game
EverQuest requires 512MB of RAM for the graphics to
display properly.

This necessarily generates Geezer Stories such as: “Why, I remember when I was at Interleaf in 1988 and it was considered outrageous and even arrogant to require a Power Mac user to have 4MB of RAM. Why, today’s programmers are spoiled…”

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