I was at a meeting in Vegas with my boss, talking about the future of casual, social games. Someone mentioned the growing popularity of CityVille, and wondered aloud how many people were playing.
“CityVille just broke 85 million monthly active users,” I said.
“How did you know that so quickly?” my boss asked me later.
“I knew that I could eventually turn my obsessive reading of gaming blogs into a career skill.”
Although my colleague Hiro is brilliant and amazing, we don’t exactly see eye-to-eye on some things. Most things. Ok, anything. (Hey, if you ever want to see a Quebecois turn funny colors, you should tell him that every problem you have with the English language can be traced back to the French in 1066.)
I saw the Strip as an unending sensory overload of twisty passages, all alike, but he knows Vegas terrifyingly well, so on my first night, he showed me around the casinos.
Each time we went into a new casino, Hiro would find the roulette wheel, and place a bet on red, and then he’d win. Each time he won, he’d see it as further proof that he was pleasing the casino gods, that luck was with him. Each time red would come up, I’d see it as further proof that it’s equally likely to come up red each time! The roulette wheel doesn’t remember what it got last time! It definitely doesn’t remember what you got at the last casino! That’s what a game of chance is, Hiro!
The casinos were pretty exciting, and I’ve never had so much fun arguing. Think I’m going to call him up and tell him why Quebec independence is a terrible idea.
Ok, so maybe Vegas isn’t completely wasted on me. (Unless my boss is reading, in which case, I was working really, really hard. All the time.)
Games blogger (and my housemates’ college classmate) Kurt Kalata is coming out with a book based on his retrogaming blog. My awesomely artistic housemate Kate is making a shrine to Roberta Williams for the cover of Kurt’s book, so when I came downstairs the other day, there was a Max in progress on the couch.
(I stole Max’ brain)
Finished Max!
Edit: The finished book!
So I’m heading to CES, the consumer electronics show in Los Vegas. I’m going to be working for the gameworld through Friday (I love that this wild virtual worldbuilding is my day job), and then staying on to see the rest of the show as a freelancer.
When I went to E3, I found out that my hotel’s promised internet was actually spotty wifi, available only in the lobby. I thought the Happiness Hotel was charming in other ways, but I need real internet, so before I booked my Vegas trip, I called hotels on the Strip to make sure that internet means in-room wifi.
It’s just possible that Vegas may be wasted on me.
On New Year’s Eve, I took the train to Boston, where I met up with Marcus to drive the rest of the way up to Maine.
Marcus had told me a few days before that he’d looked up our route in his atlas, but I thought it was a metaphor, because Marcus is a poet, and also I had no idea that anyone still used a paper atlas to get directions.
It was still the last few hours of 2010, so I asked if it was a beta release. He was not amused. It was not last time I would say something witty and clever about Marcus’ analog life. He even drives a standard transmission.
“If you want a break, I can drive stick,” I said.
“That’s ok. It’s good to know that if I had a seizure or got shot, you could drive me to the hospital.”
“I probably couldn’t, I still don’t know where it is.”
“Meg, you have a GPS!”
A little bit into our drive, Marcus decided that he knows better than the GPS.
“You can’t do that!” I cried, when he decided to deviate from the clear red line. “You’re user error! Listen to TomTom!”
Marcus said something here about always going this way and knowing a shortcut.
“TomTom says it’s an hour and ten minutes. It’s 5 now so at 6:10 we’ll see who wins!”
“Actually, Meg… my car clock’s wrong… Don’t say it.”
I have a new editorial on player motivation up on The Game Effect. I’m quite pleased with this, it took me a while to process through why some mechanics keep me one-more-turning and others just piss me off, but I think it’s a good start for a conversation on good motivating mechanics.
Power-Ups
Practical in-game awards, like improved armor, attacks and general power ups, can work well towards keeping gamers engaged.
Experience grinding stays interesting with the possibility of receiving
rare random drops. And once you have the Sword of A Thousand Truths, you’ll have to keep playing just to try it out, and from there it’s a
slippery slope of just five more minutes until dawn. I’ve tracked down
optional fights or rare merchants to get unusual items. Although I hate
to sound like I’m confirming the stereotype that girls like to play
games with shopping elements, I’ve gone out of my way to get pretty
armor, too, or stayed up just a bit later to get a complete set.Focusing entirely on improved gear as a reward system can quickly becomerepetitive. I think we’ve all played D&D runs where the plot
involved killing a level one monster to get a plus-one sword to kill a
level 2 monsters to get a plus-two sword to fight a… well, you get the
picture. Rinse-and-repeat grinding becomes tedious, making our hobby
feel like a dead-end job.Casual games — especially the dreaded pink ones, clumsily targeted at a murky idea of female players — often offer a shopping reward screen. Players begin with a still of the game’s protagonist, and over the course of the game, they can buy new clothes, accessories, and decor for the still. These are purely cosmetic changes, of course, and the goal is a completed image, not a power-up. It must be a successful reward mechanic to appear in so many games, but it does nothing for me.
Via The Game Effect – News and Features (I can’t link directly to the article, so scroll down to my name with Plants Vs. Zombies icon.)
Marcus and I are drinking coffee at Harvard Square on a Sunday afternoon just before Christmas. Ok, I’m drinking enough coffee for both of us, and he’s regaling me with stories from academia. My friend Marcus is an actual working poet, and teaches college English. I’m sort of amazed by that life, and by the way twenty-two-year-old Marcus knew he was going to be a poet and an academic, and how he’s made that happen. I’d tell Marcus how completely impressed I am by that, but I’m way too involved in this story about professor/student romance.
“What is it with younger women and older men?” Marcus asks me. “Why does it always work out that way, and never the other way?”
“Do you really want to know?” I asked. “Fine, but you can’t be mad at me. It’s just that men mature so much more slowly than women. We have to date someone older so you guys have time to catch up.”
“It’s all about maturity then?”
“It is.”
“Go play your videogames, woman.”
Saw this coming out of Penn Station this morning (since I didn’t take DeCamp today). I thought of my awesome time at the VGAs, and my recent cyberpunk ad sighting, and, well, if you saw a crazy girl skipping across the street and laughing? That was me.
Almost as soon as I moved back north, I got into this… situation. I hesitate to call it a “relationship” because the other party made it pretty clear that I couldn’t make any demands. We’d see each other when we saw each other, ok, and even though things were great when we were together, everything happens on the other party’s schedule, when they happen at all.
Some of my friends, who’d been in similar non-relationships or who were familiar with the other party, warned me that my situation might seem good now, and seemed like a complete shift from Raleigh life, but that in a few months, I’d be upset about it. The other party would be unreliable, I’d find myself in places I didn’t want to be, information from the other party would change at the last minute, with no warning, and the whole thing would go from no-strings convenience to endless frustration.
I thought I could handle it. I didn’t mind the other people, really I didn’t. My needs are pretty simple, and I didn’t want to get into a whole complicated thing, you know?
But recently, I’ve started to want more. The unreliable schedule and the poor communication is really starting to wear on me.
So that’s why I’m not taking the DeCamp into the city anymore.
