Reading Time: 11 minutes Nowadays, these games studiously court players who might only have a few minutes a day or a couple of days a week that they can spend ingame.
Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG)
Posted inGaming
Gaming through the fear of failure
Reading Time: 12 minutes It’s not your imagination: games really have gotten easier over the years. The reason has everything to do with my generation’s fear of failure, and our need to get payoffs we can’t get in real life.
Posted inGaming
The heartbreak of nerfing
Reading Time: 8 minutes Excessive nerfing can lead to an erosion of trust in the playerbase. It hits at the heart of our sense of fairness. And perhaps more than anything else, gamers want games to be fair—or at least skewed in their favor.
Posted inGaming
Show me your room: Building an ingame home
Reading Time: 7 minutes Years ago, on one of the online games I staffed, I decided to offer everyone who played it a room of their own. They could decorate it or not, do as they pleased with it, even reject it. To my delight, this decision turned out to be a very popular one. Ever since then, I’ve looked at player housing as an important way to help players connect with games.
Posted inGaming
Does not game well with others: The art of the kick
Reading Time: 12 minutes In gaming as in real life, teamwork skills matter. When one player didn’t get the memo, the game master makes the kick.
Posted inGaming, Science
ANOM: The Conflict Escalation of Privacy Continues
Reading Time: 7 minutes Today, let me show you the increasing lengths some folks will go to for privacy — and how it can be destroyed.
Posted inReligion
How Gaming Griefers Reveal Broken Systems
Reading Time: 8 minutes Hi and welcome back! Over the years, I’ve played and administered a whole bunch of games — both in real life and online. In that time, as you might expect, I’ve encountered my fair share of absolutely awful gamers. But there’s one kind of gamer who just takes the cake for sheer malevolence: griefers. You […]
Posted inGaming
That Time Someone Tried to Revitalize an Online Game I Staffed
Reading Time: 9 minutes Revitalization efforts tend to fail because once a group is solidly entrenched in a particular way of behaving and thinking together, it’s almost impossible to create lasting change in its members. Long ago, I learned that lesson in spades on an online game. So today, let me recount for you that time someone tried — and failed — to revitalize a game we played.
Posted inReligion
Penguins, Grief, and Meaningful Community (LSP #49)
Reading Time: 6 minutes Today, Lord Snow Presides over another potent contradiction to Christian claims. Why yes, people can find meaningful communities and deep friendships–and we can do it just about anywhere, even in a silly little game where kids pretend to be penguins.
Posted inGaming, Religion
Hypocrisy: A Feature, Not a Bug.
Reading Time: 12 minutes Recently I made an offhand comment about how I saw hypocrisy in religion as not a bug or a glitch in the ideology, but a feature of it. Today I want to expand on that idea a little more because I caught myself by surprise there and realized that it’s important. I began thinking about gaming, and how games are structured around features and bugs. So yes: today is a gaming post!