Sunday Something

I’m not sure how many times I’ve link dumped on a sunday, and I’m not sure if I’ll make it a weekly event. But it’s sunday, and this is something, so without further ado, I present several things for your reading pleasure. I’ve been cleaning out my Read It Later list, so for that reason you also get to read the things I’ve picked up over the last couple of months.

First we have a number of Gamasutra articles, beginning with MMOs and moving gradually into the mainstream:

• MMOs: Just a Matter of Time?: A well designed MMO relies not on time spent playing, but rather on spacing out its content and ensuring players come back for more. By enforcing a regular schedule (raids only once a week, or limiting the experience to be gained in a specific period) it creates a mental pattern encouraging the players to come back more often and hopefully spend their spare time away from the grind making friends. Making friends means staying in the game. Staying in the game means making more money. The reality, then, is that no MMO designer wants to limit the time you spend playing their game. They just want to make the game seem more fair, and keep you around for a longer period of time. Why let you play 3000 hours in your first month, when they can limit you to 300 and keep you for ten months?

• Targeted Focus, Broad Audience?: Two design angles for social games that are seemingly at odds with eachother. One method says to target a niche audience, another says to keep your appeal broad and get as many individuals as possible. The question, then, is how to unify the two. Some games might seem pretty niche at first (Frontier Ville, Mafia Wars - how many western or mafia games have you played recently, in comparison to much more popular genres like World War II shooters and sci-fi? Those are also bad examples because two successful and high profile games have recently come out in both of those genres, but hey, I tried), but then have a general enough appeal to get your grandmother playing. Seems like cornering a market is the real key to success.

• Warren Specter on Game Culture in the Mainstream: Warren Spector reminds us that casual gamers are gamers too, and says that gaming will thrive as it enters the mainstream culture much like every new art form before it has. By embracing other types of gamers and expanding gaming’s appeal, we’ll see more and more widespread cultural acceptance, not to mention bring some diversity into the types of games available. Imagine if movies tended to fall in only two categories: the Nintendo family game and the violent and bloody power fantasies. The hope, then, is that with a more diverse audience we’ll have more and more demand for games that fall outside of those groups.

Next, on an entirely different spectrum, we have an article about the future of books. However, there’s a hilarious quote from a man who doesn’t know video games other than them Grand Auto Thefts and Modern Wars, so for that reason it’s the logical follow-up to articles about video games.

• Book Have Many Futures: It’s pretty good timing that this article mentions a gradual transition away from the traditional university textbook, as spending hundreds of dollars on books that are out of date by the time they come into our hands is an incredibly wasteful, expensive, and ultimately unsustainable practice. Not that the textbook publishers have a problem with that. On a broader note, they also discuss the possible avenues for books to pursue in the future. A word of caution, too, on the Kindle vs hardcover books statistic: paperbacks are of course not included in that number, so it’s not like they sold more electronic books than they did physical ones. Personally, I loathe hardcover books, so I wait a year or more if that’s what it takes to get my hands on a paperback. Not just because of price, either, I just hate having huge books that wouldn’t look out of place in a classy library when you take off the jacket.

Moving from books to writing for anime, we have a rant from the writer behind well-known anime like Ergo Proxy, Samurai Champloo, Eureka 7, Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex, and the biggest one of all - Cowboy Bebop. Then a roundtable discussion on his rant from the wonderful folks at Japanator. Following that is a discussion of the American meaning of the word “otaku.”

• Storywriter Dai Sato is frustrated with Japanese anime: Not much to say about this, honestly, it’s just the story of how this guy is really angry about the state of anime in Japan and how he sees the industry losing much of what made it special and pandering to a rapidly shrinking audience. By catering to existing fans and not seeking to provide new experiences and expand that audience, the anime industry as we know it could very well crash. More on that in the next article.

• Japanator Discusses: Dai Sato rants on the state of anime: Analysis of Dai Sato’s rant, judging it more than a little “butthurt” but admitting he may also have a point. In particular, Brad Rice dishes (hey get it rice dishes) some Serious Business on the industry, which is exactly why he hosts an infrequent podcast called Serious Business with Brad Rice.

• I, Otaku: Identifying as a J-Culture enthusiast: People like to have a label for themselves, if only to explain to other people what exactly they’re interested in. For that reason, otaku has largely become the accepted term for english-speaking fans of anime and pretty much anything Japanese. Some people argue against the use of the term by people who are ignorant of its origins (it’s a derogatory term in Japan), while others happily prance about squealing about how they’re the NUMBAR OEN OTAKU EVAR. The reality, then, is that this is America and we can steal words and adopt them for an entirely different use than they were originally intended. But isn’t that a wonderful thing? I think it is. I think we can be otaku if we want to be.

If you have no idea about my interests, there’s your crash course. Hope you enjoyed something up there!