My GDC 2024 talk Revisiting Fun: 20 Years of a Theory of Fun is now posted here. Once again, I had a lot of fun drawing cartoon heads of lots of people who feature in the talk. The talk really is a direct sequel to the one from a decade ago, Ten Years Later. Unlike last time, there is no updated edition just yet, though I was asked by lots of people if there was! Since the original book came out, it has gone from being controversial, to being dogma to rebel against, to being “obvious” according to many. It’s available in nine languages, and continues to sell just about as well as it did when ..read more

Connections The new daily game at the New York Times is called Connections, and I’ve seen a few people comment that they just don’t like it as much as Wordle or Spelling Bee. That the difficulty is inconsistent and it often makes you just feel stupid. I thought it would be interesting to contrast this to Word Dad, a puzzle game made by my friend, master game designer John Cutter. A brief aside on puzzles All three of these are more correctly called puzzles, of course. The main difference between a game and a puzzle is that a puzzle has one real solution, an optimal way through the challenge ..read more

Well, twenty-five years is a long time. Half a life, in fact! Given that I actually started work on UO on September 1st 1995, it’s actually more than half. The fact that the game is still running is a testament to the devoted community and the ongoing maintenance over the years from countless people. I note a lack of thinkpieces and articles, this time around. The fact of the matter is that the most frequently targeted gamer audience wasn’t born when UO came out. A lot of the folks streaming about games weren’t born yet either. I saw a post on Reddit yesterday that asked “how come no other M ..read more

I just watched a couple of videos about sandbox vs themepark games (in particular one by NerdSlayer and another by Josh “Strife” Hayes)… One thing that struck me about the ways players often talk about this (because at this point the history is so old) is that people think of sandbox as the older version of MMOs, and themeparks as newer. But that’s not right – sandbox is not the older form. Sandboxes are the evolution of themepark MMOs, not the antecedent. Part of the reason why this isn’t clear is because most players today haven’t played what themeparks were originally, back on the text vir ..read more

This paper on “Mastering uncertainty: A predictive processing account of enjoying uncertain success in video game play” is very worth a read if you are interested in the frontiers of figuring out what “fun” is. Luckily for me, it doesn’t say I’ve been on the wrong track for decades. It does raise interesting questions given its framework — I’d love to see slot machines explained — though there is some stuff on affect that likely ties in. It also teases out some of why I have never felt comfortable with the “flow = fun” equation. / Another interesting intersection with other material would be ..read more

I’ve posted up the slides for my Games Learning + Society keynote that I gave at UC Irvine on Wednesday morning. It’s more talk about metaverses, with some cautionary notes. Those of you who have read recent blog posts will find a decent amount of it familiar. Click here to take a look!   ..read more

Let’s get one thing out of the way first. Ownership of anything digital is illusory, and always will be. Then again, it’s illusory in the real world, too. Ownership is a convention, not physical reality. This is why we have sayings like “Possession is nine-tenths of the law,”which basically means “you can claim you own something all you want, but if you don’t physically have the object, it’s pretty hard to enforce.” In digital settings, of course, you never physically have anything. At best, you have a physical container of data. Data is different The characteristics of data are quite differe ..read more

Making objects in a virtual world actually do something is way harder than just drawing them – and as we have seen, drawing them is already fraught with challenges. Items as pure data Once upon a time, in the old days of DikuMUDs, every object in the game was of a type – ITEM_WEAPON, ITEM_CONTAINER and so on. These were akin to what I referred to as templates in the last article. But they were hard-coded into the game server. If you added new content to the game, you were limited by the data fields that were provided. You couldn’t add new behaviors to a vanilla DikuMUD at all. That item type ..read more

First we talked about clients and servers; then we talked about maps. Now we are finally at the hardest part of virtual worlds to wrap your head around – not coincidentally, also the aspect that gets people the most excited. Things. Stuff. Bits and bobs. Widgets. You know: objects. A lot of folks think a digital object is something like this: Objects might seem simple, but they are actually very complicated. The subtleties lead to confusion about what is possible in online worlds or metaverses – and the answer is both more and less than people tend to think. Digital paradoxes Let’s start by ..read more

The redoubtable Jon Radoff from Beamable has been doing a great series of videos called Building the Metaverse on a wide array of topics related to, well, the Metaverse. Today he’s posted up a video where the two of us riff on interoperability, governance, digital ownership, and much much more. It’s got lots of real talk. Some key bits to whet your appetite: It’s far more likely that you’re going to replicate aspects of human reality than invent a new human reality. Governance is not a technology problem. If you are operating a Cloud AR kind of environment, are you a government? Every ..read more