Y’all know the drill. I get a game, I play through it, I post two articles about it – one each detailing good and bad sides of the game. I meant to do that for Portal 2 ever since I pre-ordered it. The thing is, I still haven’t finished the game and don’t feel at […]

When Warhammer Online introduced the endless free trial, I was all over that. You could continue playing the most interesting aspect of the game forever without paying, basically introducing a casual PvP minigame you could play for free. Awesome. Now World of Warcraft has an endless free trial as well, except it is awful. Now […]

Reading this interview with Peter Molyneux over at Gamasutra got me thinking. Do we need public research on game design? Oftentimes products, including software, are not created in the depths of some secret company laboratory. Instead, the underlying principles are developed in research facilities with little or no commercial application in mind. The gyroscope in […]

Today’s post is really just about me asking you a question: How important is single player content to you? You see, I’ve had an idea for a game in my head for a while that might actually be feasible to independently produce in my free time. The catch being that I would not trust myself […]

“Insofar as our findings suggest that the operating mechanism by which violent gameplay causes crime to fall is the gameplay itself, and not the violence, then regulations should be carefully designed so as to avoid inadvertently reducing the time intensity, or the appeal, of video games.” – Cunningham et al., via Slashdot

One often praised advantage of so-called free-to-play games is that you get to play sporadically without having to worry about wasting a subscription when you are not playing. Does this actually work for people in MMOs though? Ever since LotRO went F2P I plan to drop in and finally experience all those praise-worthy parts of […]

After this weekend, there can be no question that League of Legends is not only an e-sport but also one that can attract huge audiences. They hit the 200k viewers mark on their live stream from Dreamhack – and that’s with other popular streams on as well, such as Day[9] commenting Starcraft 2. The Riot […]

The blogosphere is an awesome thing. One blogger posts about some topic and you’ll see posts on the same topic pop up all over within hours. Sometimes I try to avoid beating the proverbial dead horse, sometimes I feel like I have something meaningful to add to the debate. And sometimes I feel that the […]

“With a mere six months of algorithm development and three years of supercomputing processing power, the team determined that if a player kills nine rats there’s an 83.2379% chance that their next action will be to kill a rat.” – Zoso, Killed in a Smiling Accident

There’s a ton of content in MMORPGs that is simply not for me. Holiday events? Meh. PvP? Pff. Minipets? Yeah, right.  Achievements? Are you kidding me? No. All of that I’m fine with because I simply get to ignore those parts and focus on what I care about (i.e. group content.) I always found it […]