Prophesy of Pendor - the Designers View

This is the first post on Blogspot, the previous posts were manually ported over to this site from another hosting service.

It has been 20 days since the release of Prophesy of Pendor, the mod for Mount&Blade. We have over 7500 direct downloads, and over 1850 patch updates. For those of you who do not know, Mount&Blade is an independent game offering from a development house out of Turkey and more information on their offering can be found on past pages.

The success of Prophesy of Pendor, to date, is interesting to me on several levels. It should be interesting to you as well as it helps support some of the design concepts that I have been talking about.

The strength of a game is not measured in how often you play it. It is measured in how much you think about it when you are not playing. To do this effectively you have to keep alive what I like to call the unanswered question. If you think of your favorite television shows, movie franchises and books, you will see that this is a common trend in those that are very successful. Games are the same way.

One of the keys of course is pattern recognition. When we create a game that has identifiable patterns, and we, as the player, know what, when, how, where and who, then the experience becomes redundant. In MMORPG’s this is the point that social interaction and social ties becomes the bonds that keep us playing. No such social bonds exist with single player games. We go out and purchase the next game. In some cases, if we are savvy enough, we delve into the Mods and play those for a while then move on.

Part of the reason that this Mod is enjoying success is that it was designed to keep alive unanswered questions and uses elementary chaos theory to deliver content. This latter piece will be expanded in a later released to drive events in the game world so that no two games will be the same.

Technically I have created a scenario that simulates a heroic journey. This is a key element, luckily inherent in the Mount&Blade engine, is heavily accented in this mod.

The environment is framed in such a way as things in the game world can be identified to larger story elements that form meaning for the players. Meaning is key here, players are able to extrapolate from what they experience in the game and apply it to the story and to characters in and out of the game. It all ties together to form a holistic experience, and drives discovery, answers existing questions and generates more questions.

Most interestingly, and this will be accelerated in the next release, it blurs the line between reality and fantasy to the point that playing the game itself and finishing it has meaning beyond just the game.

The key concepts here are creating meaning, delivering content and events in ways that are not expected, and keeping unanswered questions alive. A game ends for a player when one of these three elements ceases. If there is no meaning, or if the content is delivered in recognizable chunks which is easily definable, or that there are no more questions to ask, the player realizes that they are done, regardless whether they have driven the game to its conclusion or not.

On another topic close to my heart is to talk again about Product vs. Service and why a product oriented approach fails us as gamers. I had a very interesting experience on the Forums of Mount&Blade recently where some players took offense to the idea of a service-based approach to a game offering. My guess is that they just do not understand the ramifications. That is ok, as I fully am aware that new concepts that are outside our experience are very difficult for folks to understand.

So, lets go over this a bit and do this exercise together.

If you owned a game company, how do you make your money? That is simple right? You make a game and sell it to a publisher and they pay you lots of cash right? That is roughly how it works with of course some royalty payments if you are lucky.

Here is the problem. As the owner of the company you have to keep making new games to stay in business and keep the cash flow positive. Thus as the game company you must intentionally, and pay attention here gamers, NOT CREATE A GAME THAT CAN BE PLAYED FOR YEARS AND DELIVER ALL OF THE FEATURES THAT GAMERS WANT.

In short game development shops will never deliver that ultimate gaming experience. Once they do that, you, the gamer, stop buying new games, and they are out of business.

What this means guys, and I am talking to those gamers who were so adamantly against the concept of gaming as a service, is that you will never see a game that delivers the type of experience that you will enjoy and explore for years as long as it is a product. Yes you will see some Mods and yes you will see some minor improvements, but in the end, the only entity who wins from this scenario is the publisher, the distributors and the retailers.

The guy with the short end of the stick is you, the gamer.

The development houses historically have competed like this for many years, and this was not ever an issue as the central theme of generational improvements was based in graphics. Much better graphics, very little improvement on game play and you had a hit. That is what everyone talked about right? That is what the gaming population today is conditioned (and I use this term in the true behaviorist sense), to accept.

Well, we have reached or will shortly reach, that point of realism in our graphics engines that will exceed the capabilities of our eyes and brains to determine a significant difference between generations of graphic improvements.

What happens to the product paradigm then?

Food for thought.

Peace out,


Jim

The 56th hour

There are many things that would like to discuss and share with you. Right now I am involved with a project as discussed earlier, taking some of this theory and putting it into practice to give folks, like yourself, a practical example of what I have been pondering.

Fifty six hours ago I released the Mod to Mount&Blade. At this moment, over 2500 folks have downloaded and are playing it. There is a nice thread on the Mount&Blades forum where there is some great feedback, and more positive and supportive than I could have hoped for.

This is the heavy support phase after a release where all those little bugs that slipped through QA are addressed. I will be in this mode for around a week, then start to work on the next iteration of this project.

There is a fine line here that needs to be acknowledged. While there are some things that I want to deliver to the community that further my own goals, which are part entertainment and part real world demonstration of some of these concepts we discuss on this Blog. As a product marketing manager, it is essential that the community of players be engaged to help drive future features and that the process be as transparent as possible.

One thing I have learned that is a key point. Once you release a product, any product, to a group of people, you no longer control that product. To be successful, the community of consumers must provide the fuel that is transformed by the development team into results to get the product from point A, to point B.

In saying this, we have to acknowledge that this MOD for Mount&Blade is a product, not a service. The whole Mount&Blade business model is predicated on a product orientation, and a MOD, such as Prophesy of Pendor, and many others are just that.. modifications applicable to a product to increase the staying power and revenues of the product offering.

The problem with this approach is that it is not sustainable. You will note that many of the earlier pioneers of the community are no longer with us. They have moved on. There are many reasons for this, but the primary one is that real world life requires time and effort. This type of hobby is extremely time consuming and often to engage at this level is at the detriment of aspects of real life. They had to make a choice, as everyone who mods will eventually make a choice, to continue with their hobby or to pursue real world dollars that solve real world problems.

This is one of the primary reasons I am such an advocate of the game service platform approach as I shared with you folks several posts ago. If this activity paid a modder based upon the the time spent by players playing their creations then you would have much higher quality offerings that were really engaging, and focused on exactly what the players wanted. Further, it would allow modders to make a living or supplement their income which would solve real world problems and they would not need to move on. If you have not read that post.. take a look.

So, you may ask why am I modding? I have the desire to create, as many artists, writers and modders do. But more importantly, right now in these difficult enconomic times, I am between jobs and I have ample time to put into this endevor. The result I hope will be a win-win for all of us.

Peace out.. and I will post more soon.

Jim

The Vision

Hello all. I would like to give you a vision in this entry. It will likely last several entries, but that is ok.

The vision I plan to impart a few paragraphs down requires a bit of an introduction. It is a vision of the future of gaming, or at the least how I would like to see the future.

To appreciate what I am about to reveal, you may want to consider the source. I am an old guy, who cut his teeth on gaming just under 40 years ago at age 10 playing boxed war games by Avalon Hill. I picked up “Dungeons & Dragons” when it was advertised in an 1/8^th page ad in Wargamer’s Digest when I was going through a table top gaming phase in 1974. Likely I have (or had) one of the first printings of the 3-booklet set. In 1980 I started a game company (in the wrong location), and developed computer games for the Atari and Apple microcomputers. It unfortunately failed, not because of the game design (it was called Shadow-Hawk I and it was similar to Elite but 5 years earlier), but because we could not release in time and missed the Christmas retail window. In short, we ran out of money and had to fold. During this time I developed a blue-print for the future of gaming and what phases we would have to go through as a company to change with them. I was about 90% right on, the biggest flaw was that the ability for massively multiplayer games in a shared graphical game world came about 5-7 years earlier than I predicted. Later in the mid 1980’s through the early 1990’s I developed turn based multi-player games played by mail. In 1990 I saw the coming of the internet as a death knell for this business, and tried with the help of several programmers to develop real time games played via the internet through a gaming service. There were lots of real world problems that caused this not to be finished (divorce, disease, lead programmer leaving) and in 1994 I left gaming on a professional basis for nearly 10 years. I tried to return in 2003 with what I am about to reveal to you, but with limited success.

The reason this is important is that I have a track record of being ahead of the curve and being able to spot market trends. As I opened this blog, I revealed that likely I will not see the benefits of what I have inside my head. I have spent years researching this concept and documenting a business case for it’s success. It is my sincere hope that this discussion will help the right person at the right time and this vision will, in some form, be given birth for the benefit of all of us.

The future of gaming is not a game. It is a game publishing service. It is based upon the most successful and proven business model utilizing the Internet today. I call that model a “T” based service model and both Amazon and Ebay use it.

It is a service provided by a gaming company that sits between a provider and a consumer and provides immense value BOTH WAYS.

For the Provider: The game company enables the provider to create games using a standardized platform, tools and extensive provided artwork assets. It provides the infrastructure that enables players to sign up, select games they want to play or download, and then keeps track of the time the player spends on what product. Monthly totals are calculated and part of the players subscription fees are paid to the various providers based strictly upon usage. The “Design tools” are free and freely downloaded by anyone and most importantly they are aimed at the high end player, and not the low end developer. The company provides a rating system which is calculated from the actions or the players and organized feedback from the player community that cuts the poor titles from the offering stack.

For the Player: The game company offers a service where you sign up for $15.00 a month. You have access to hundreds if not thousands of titles that you can play any or all, as you desire. New titles are added all the time, some are good, and some are great and the poor ones are dropped from the offering.

From the Company: This solves so many problems in game design. It eliminates the risk issue that publishers have in investing in new titles, as you only pay for titles that are successful. It gives a constant stream of content that is provided by your game designers and providers. The company focuses on marketing the service, providing solid infrastructure, billing service, and creating artwork.

This situation we see ourselves in holistically in the gaming community is very similar to a situation that occurred in history several hundred years ago. It was in Europe where all knowledge and technology was controlled by the church. In order to create books you had to go through years of training in the monasteries, be subject to rigorous standards and do menial copy work before you could even dare hope to write your own book. Even then, it had to be approved. Then came the printing press and the arguments that the clergy had with allowing non-priests to write books. What could they, the untrained and uninitiated possibly write about?

Today this same flavor of issue is before us and it is strangling creativity, and stopping a renaissance in gaming. The ideas are out there, the writers, storytellers, and novelists abound. What stops them from producing games? They are not trained, are not closely tied to the industry. In order to bring their artistic imaginations alive and be free to create, they have to do years of base work and support business minded people to make money. In short, we stifle creativity for the sake of profit. Yet ironically it is that very creativity that generates profit in the first place. What I am doing as a Modder with Mount&Blade clearly should illustrate that there is talent available out there that can provide professional looking and engaging products. I am not alone.

Some of the market research that I have done shows that there are thousands and even tens of thousands of people who would love the opportunity to create offerings on this system. Just look at what has been done with the games that have decent modding tools out there. Look at Neverwinter Nights who after 5 years after release is still a growing community! Statistically speaking there are hundreds of people who would excel, and a dozen who would be at the J.K. Rowling level at creating gaming products through a service as I described. In addition, there are millions of people who would jump at the chance to play this service, as it would provide immense value for their dollar.

This is the vision. A place where a college student can spend a summer vacation and create an offering that serves as a part time job through the school year. It is a place where a housewife can create a vision of gaming, by women for women when her kids are at school. It is a place where the creative novelists can express their thoughts, ideas and stories in a new medium. It is a place where the creative do what they do best: Create, and the best is consumed and enjoyed by the player community and the company who provides the service takes no risks. It is a vision where hundreds of jobs are created. It is a vision of leadership: Where we enable those who have the talent to succeed with their passion.

Peace out and more later.

Jim

Focus on the Guild

I was reviewing my posts the other day and realized that I am taking too many short-cuts with information in my desire to tell you what I know. The communication is too rich, meaning that I give a sentence of information and expect you to understand the twenty paragraphs of implications behind it. For that I apologize and will try to slow down a bit.

To recap, my thought process runs like this: There mmorpg game itself is repetitive, sometimes story driven for entertainment flavor, has components of finding items, creating a unique avatar (to greater or lesser degrees of success), engaging in the same types of behavior over and over again with little variance. Once you reach the pinnacle (if you can last that long), then you drift to another offering looking for that elusive “something” and you start the process all over again and at least to date, cannot find. Those games that players tend to “stay with” and hang on to, tend to be socially strong in that somehow players bond with other players and create a social network that create psychological ties. It is these ties that keep people together and playing a game, not the game itself.

My contention is that the game can be vastly improved to raise the interest in the simulation so that it does not become repetitive, and that the social networks that keep people in the game can be vastly improved as well.

Today I am focusing on a design element of guild interaction, or the role of player created organizations and how they can be improved. As previously noted we talked about creating the “guild” or player run organization and giving it deep hooks into the game system/simulation itself.

I am playing a small browser based game right now called AstroEmpires, where thousands of players play against each other in a multi-player environment. It is out of Portugal , and it is very simple. I know in real life several people who play and the general consensus is that it is like playing a game with Excel. It is simple, (too simple) has a poorly designed end game, yet… tens of thousands of people play.

Today it dawned on me why. The very topic we are talking about here, the guild, has slightly deeper than normal hooks into the game system and that the players are allowed to be creative with their guild and empire biographies. A strong forum system is in place for the guild, battles against the guild are posted in the combat reports section, there is a forum for news, trade and announcements as well and a large area for the guild owners to be creative and post additional information about what they do and how they do it.

This has the effect of allowing players to effectively band together, communicate, become part of an organization greater than themselves, and act as a larger game entity.

This is the half step in the right direction, and it is a welcome innovation.

Yet this is not enough. The guild structure is still too unstructured, no in-game direct benefits are built into the simulation that facilitate and empower the guild.

The goals would be to create a list of empire and guild bonuses that can be applied either to a single player, or to a guild. Let me give some examples of this line of thought.

Create a formal treaty system that gave bonuses for specific activities, such as a trade treaty, preferred trade partner, Non-Aggression Pacts, Alliances, War etc. The effective “stance” of the guild towards other guilds yield bonuses to player activity.

Create roles inside the guild that were given game bonuses, which in turn can be modified by the guild owners so they can customize their internal structure and provide incentives for member engagement. Roles could then generate in-game events or bonuses based upon their actions. Example: The Guild Leader’s fleets can give a x% bonus (depending on the ability), to offense and defense for guild members who have fleets in the same sector.

In MMORPG speak, this means effective that the Guild provides the player members special in-game abilities that are made available to members at the discretion of the guild leaders. Imagine for example that a guild has attained a 10% combat bonus in melee combat. The leaders can associate that special ability to various titles they have created for their guild. This gives the leaders tools to entice player members to perform specific activities to the benefit of the guild.

This should be a no-brainer. We are empowering the key players in the game (guild leaders), to help keep interest high in the game by giving them the tools to be successful with the simulation. More later.

Why do people Play Games..

It has been put forth that the main difference between man and animal, is that man is better at adapting to his environment and that man strives to make sense of his actions in some greater context other than himself. There are many studies under the heading of sociology, philosophy, and psychology that help define personal and cultural needs in the desire to understand the meaning and context of mans actions. There are more works on this subject than can fill several libraries. One important set of works are the studies by Carl Jung that despite culture, there are a handful of universal archetypes that prevail across cultural barriers that manifest themselves in literature, lore and religion. Another aspect of this puzzle rests in the fact that there are underlying needs that people have that are filled by actively or passively engaging in recreational activity of this nature.

These needs can be broken down into several distinct categories and are the same measures to determine behavior in the workplace. These needs interrelate among themselves and those activities which promote the widest breadth of these factors have the widest appeal to the consumer market.

Achievement: This axis relates to the recognition of work and awards for performance. The rewards and recognition are almost always intrinsic.

Power: This axis relates to the ability to be safe. Power is power over your environment and with that power, the ability to meet challenges that threaten safety.

Acceptance: This axis relates to the ability to socialize with other people and gain a measure of acceptance and a sense of self worth.

People learn and adapt either by their own actions or by watching others perform actions. Literature in the form of books, plays, stage, television and films offer a passive approach to gaining experience. We all watch these forms of entertainment and gain insight into how other people under interesting situations cope and deal with problems. I am not diminishing the artistic aspects of these endeavors, just brining up the underlying psychological needs that are being played upon when we engage in such activity.

Many of these forms of entertainment are social in nature, watched or consumed with a group of friends or peers together or individually. After the event, we often engage in behaviors that reinforce the perceptions from the experience. This re-living of the events are highly social in nature In western culture the social aspects of these shared experiences are widely embraced by females of our society. The social aspect of entertainment and shared activity is on the whole, generally more important to females than the power or achievement aspects.

Western Men on the other hand, are generally more interested in western culture for either the power or achievement aspects. The younger the male, the more power is of importance as the need to “Prove” oneself is a forefront of thought.

These observations should be understood to be group averages and behavior, and not necessarily applied as a hard and fast rule to a single individual. Every aspect at one time or another will play an important role for a single person. Also regardless of gender or culture, there will be people who outside of the norm. There will be young males who are more interested in the social aspects of play, and there will be females who will exhibit the need for achievement or power over the social aspects. Many of these concepts have been brought forth and discussed in minute detail by academic thought leaders in this field. Please reference http://terranova.blogs.com/. For much more detailed analysis of this topic.

Now, this has been an interesting diatribe in academic understanding. How does that translate to designs and how does it solve our problems?

In short, we play for the experience. When the experience becomes redundant, repetitive, and “Been there done that”, we lose interest. In other words killing 3rd level Rats is the same as killing 30th level Desert Rats, we cease learning. There is no “Unanswered Question” or alternative method or information to gain. However, there is a big BUT. If we have made social contacts in the virtual world, and those social contacts provide us value then we will find ways to stay with the simulation until such time as the value for the social interaction falls below the threshold of acceptance. In other words, the boredom of doing the same things over and over again exceeds the value we gain from the interaction with the social group.

I believe that we can keep the virtual world from becoming boring or redundant, and at the same time strengthen the social bonds that exist.

The question again is: How?

The first part is accomplished with a true dynamic game environment. Imagine a virtual world where what we encounter and deal with is determined in part or in whole by the actions of other players against the simulation. It changes and creates it own content as part of the simulation. It never stays the same, and morphs constantly providing new challenges and new situations. I will say now that this has already been done in test environments just to put the nay sayers who believe that the technology does not exist for this concept, at east. I will get to this in great detail in future posts.

The second part is accomplished by taking the “clan” or “Guild” ie.. the player run organization and plant it deeply into the game simulation itself. Expand this where the player run organization is part of the game. Think of this as a shared character class. Imagine a Fantasy type virtual world, where the guild created by the players have special abilities and game bonuses that are given to the players who are members. Imagine then that these abilities are purchased or created by various players based upon actions that are relevant for their individual level. For example, imagine that we accumulate “Guild Points” for lack of a better term, by fulfilling quests or defeating NPC’s (MOBS). One point for a single similar leveled character. If a character defeats a NPC of lower or greater than 2 levels, then nothing is gained. Thus a 3rd level character can generate the same amount of “Guild points” as an elite 80th level character. The contribution to the Guild to purchase and maintain it’s bonuses are the same.

Suddenly, we now have parity between the casual gamer and the hard core gamer, where they can become relevant to each other. This strengthens the bonds and social ties as everyone is now working towards a greater goal that helps everyone in the guild directly.

This also now does something very interesting. It creates a true Multi-player experience, instead of a single player experience set against a static setting with other single players.

Next post will expand upon this concept greatly.

Historical Perspective

Those who do not learn from History are doomed to repeat it.

Today’s “Gaming” has deeper roots that most individuals realize. To deny those roots and underlying cultural and psychological factors is to akin to painting a life-like painting with two colors. Astonishingly enough, that is exactly what most game designs and products have attempted to accomplish in recent memory.

The origins of “Gaming” are well documented and well ignored. The origins date back to ancient times of Kings and Pharos, princes and generals who used miniature representations of armies and leaders to better understand impending battles. This pastime was educational, very expensive and only in the hands of the elite of society.

In more modern times, this pastime, termed “Wargaming” was a hobby in England and Europe and people simulated historical battles using hundreds and sometimes thousands of painted miniatures and a set of rules that simulated conditions to properly recreate these conflicts and battles. Interestingly enough, it was H.G. Wells who was exposed to this form of entertainment and brought it to the United States in early part of last century. These miniatures were in several sizes, the most popular being 15mm and 25mm, with the latter being both more expensive, easier to paint and vastly more popular. In the 1960’s the idea had morphed into two distinct forms of “Gaming”. The original form of miniatures were pleasing to the eye, held great appeal, but were very expensive and extremely time consuming to research and paint. The second was a new form of “Gaming” which was the “battle in a box”. Two companies “The Avalon Game Company” and “SPI” put out hundreds of boxed titles using cardboard boxes, graphically pleasing game boards and die cut counters to represent armies, leaders, units or airplanes depending upon the simulation. These two companies had great success and their dollar performance vastly exceeded the companies who created the miniatures and rules.

The big breakthrough however was in 1972 when a very small company in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin added a unique “supplement” to a set of rules for medieval combat called “Chainmail”. This supplement added the possibility for recreating fantasy combat based upon the literary work “The Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien. This “afterthought” rules addendum provoked such a positive response that shortly thereafter the two founders Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson of this small company “Tactical Studies Rules” created a new product. In 1973 three booklets were published that expanded upon this original idea and “Dungeons and Dragons” was born. The phenomenon of this work is extremely important to understand. Initially the idea was to add a fantasy element to an existing methodology for recreation of historical battles or in this case, battles that only were the results of fantasy literature. What followed in the next decade was not at all what was intended. This work bridged two different worlds. It brought together, military simulation with storytelling. Not just any storytelling, fantasy/mythological storytelling. It was a bridge between the world of literature and mathematics. Rule sets evolved, and in the next 10 years an explosion of expression of this hybrid form of literature evolved.

At the same time unique things were happening in other mediums, such as books, comics, and movies: An explosion of Fantasy authors and books, the rise of the Marvel universe in comic-books, and the release of the science fiction movies Star Trek and Star Wars. All of these fed the imaginations of gamers and launched millions of hours of interactive story-telling around such rules sets as Traveler, Gammaworld, Dungeons and Dragons, Champions, the Auruin Grimoire, Chivalry and Sorcery and Empire of the Petal Throne to name just a few. Supplements came from companies like the Judges Guild, and TSR that started us down a path of “Canned Adventures” that we find heavily influencing game design and the games produced today.

This new form of expression slightly predated the evolution of technology into household forms such as the home computer. The introduction of affordable technology accelerated the interest of this expression by adding yet another discipline into the mix, that of art.

In the 1980s several dominant forms of this expression began to take shape, interrelate, interconnect and expand. There existed the tabletop miniature market, the role playing market, the boxed game market, the play-by-mail market and finally with the addition of technology, with the added artistic expression, the computer game market that crossed all of these aforementioned low technology markets.

The roleplaying market expanded with an emphasis upon storytelling and evolution of game-worlds, plotlines and characters framed by elaborate rule sets designed to simulate heroic archetypes. The original introduction of Dungeons and Dragons spawned hundreds of rules sets, thousands of published works, the vast majority of which did not survive the marketing strength of the main competitors. It is of note that the survivors of this time period did not necessarily have better rules or products, but better marketing machines. A lesson still not learned by most technology companies today.

The miniature market expanded with the focus of fantasy and science fiction elements and expansion of rules sets to simulate such imaginary battles.

The Play-by-mail market, born in 1975 and thrived until the late 1990’s, was a combination form of entertainment that allowed multiple players to compete/play with and against one another using turn based systems encapsulating all of the low tech markets of role-playing, military simulation and adding political and economic simulations as well.

The boxed set market was still led by the Avalon Hill Game company in the 1980’s slowly began to dwindle in the pure military simulation sense. Later in the 1990’s picked up again by primarily German companies and designs using more abstract and innovative game mechanics to become a popular method of entertainment today.

Technologic Innovation:

We know well the impact of technology on our day-to-day lives, and at no time in our history has an event so changed world society in such a way. For our purposes we need to look at several factors of technology and how it has modified entertainment and to a lesser degree, the impact this has on the lives of those who engage actively or passively in technologic entertainment.

From low technology origins, the computer game market exploded in the 1980’s and over the last 25 years has become a very popular and lucrative form of entertainment. Initially computer games were limited in scope and power to engage the player in manual dexterity and coordination simulations. As power of the computers expanded, so did the complexity and artwork of these products. The operative word being product. Initially we had point of sale computer game products designed primarily for a single person to engage a computer in some form of simulation or story. New products enticed players with better graphics or artwork designed to appeal at the point of purchase and by and large the game play aspects were secondary considerations. In fact, under this business model, the only way to survive was to create a steady stream of products that eclipsed previous products, which historically have been at the point of purchase. In other words, the key innovations have revolved around the realistic expression of artwork and eye candy to entice a consumer to purchase a new product.

Technology has also played a key role in other forms of literature and art. Stage and theatre have been eclipsed with technological breakthroughs that have given us new forms of expression namely television, and film. Advances in artwork, special effects, computer aided graphics and simulation have given birth to forms of expression never before possible in our history.

Which brings us to the current day.

What we see today is the macro trend of the slow convergence of literary forms into a single technologic powered form of entertainment that can be both passive and active in nature. Today few computer games are created that does not support some sort of multi-player option and interactive cable-TV is being developed and released to target markets.

The form of gaming that has been termed “On-Line gaming”, provides a very unique opportunity to cross many fields of entertainment. The most current term used to describe this genre is Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game or MMORPG. Like the computer game market did to the low tech gaming markets, this form of entertainment has the unrealized potential to cut across many existing game genres and other non-technologic entertainment fields.

I touched on many things here.. and will elaborate further shortly.
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Introduction

What is this Blog about? Why is it here? What do you get out of it?

Should you waste your time with an old fart?

Generally the answer to all of these questions is to "Move along. This is not the blog you are looking for."

However, if you like MMORPG's, are a designer, games programmer, producer, investor, or an avid game hobbyist, then these ramblings that follow will arm your mind with a rare perspective in dealing with the entertainment convergence, and MMORPG game design.

Who am I? My name is Jim Landes. You can look up my history on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Landes.

Why am I doing this? Because I have spent many years of my life trying to bring profound ideas and designs to gamers around the world. I have not succeeded to the level I would wish. Many of these ideas and perspective are bigger than I am, and larger than I can execute upon. In short, I do not want what I have spent 20+ years working on to die with me. There is immense knowledge locked in my head. It is my sincere hope that someone can pick up nuggets of value from what will follow in this soliloquy.

All I ask, is that somewhere and somehow you reference me if these ideas and perpectives have helped you in some manner.

Thanks and enjoy....
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