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Social gaming and MMOGs: Quick link roundup
Quick list games-related info
A friend of mine recently asked me for a list of blogs, books, and other resources on game design, social gaming, virtual goods, etc. I wrote up a quick e-mail, and thought I’d publish it here as well.
A friend of mine recently asked me for a list of blogs, books, and other resources on game design, social gaming, virtual goods, etc. I wrote up a quick e-mail, and thought I’d publish it here as well.
If anyone has interesting stuff to add, please shoot me a note at voodoo [at] gmail!
I have not found much on the metrics of the games industry, particularly on the virtual economies side. That’s definitely one area I’d like to learn more about…
MMOG and virtual world blogs:
- Virtual World News
- Massively
- Terra Nova
- Virtual Economics
- Virtual Economy
- Free to Play
- PlayOn from PARC
- Worlds in Motion
Individual blogs:
- Jeremy Liew (Lightspeed)
- Dan Cook (Seattle game designer)
- Daniel James (CEO of Three Rings – Puzzle Pirates & Whirled)
- Sean Ryan (CEO of Meez)
- Nabeel Hyatt (CEO of Conduit Labs)
- Erik Bethke (CEO of GoPets)
- Nick Yee (Stanford researcher on virtual worlds)
- Justin Smith (Inside Social Games)
- Damion Schubert (MMOG designer)
Books:
- Designing Virtual Worlds (New Riders Games)
- Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot
- Massively Multiplayer Game Development (Game Development Series)
- Game Design Workshop: Designing, Prototyping, and Playtesting Games (Gama Network Series) (Gama Network Series)
UPDATE: added a couple new links. There’s more on Mike Gowen’s blog here.
Recent posts
Great list of links. Well compiled work. i would like to refer a link which i found great for any gamer. http://www.watgame.com it has latest info about the gaming business n all the related stuff.
Ashi
2 Jun 08 at 12:33 am
I’d add http://www.raphkoster.com and his book, A Theory of Fun.
John Donham
6 Jun 08 at 6:04 pm
Others that I’d recommend people look at:
Scott Jennings – http://brokentoys.org/ – Infamous MMO design commentator (LumTheMad), now a professional game designer, blogs a lot on the social issues inside the major MMOs, with a balanced perspective between player desires, real behaviours, designer wishes, community attempts to balance it all, and practicalities of support and implementation. Somewhat similar to Damion’s blog, but leaning more towards the player and community-manager perspectives where Damion leans more towards the designer perspective.
Alice Taylor – http://www.wonderlandblog.com/ – commentator on all forms of social gaming, social behaviour in WoW, and Alternate Reality Games etc. Also is/has been actively responsible for funding some of the more innovative projects (previously a commissioning editor for BBC, now at Channel4 IIRC), but she’s also an active WoW player/addict/guild leader, so has a pretty broad view on things.
Adrian Hon – http://mssv.net – lead designer for PerplexCity ARG, writes often on issues of writing for games from a modern literature perspective, and on subverting all sorts of aspects of every day life to be used in gaming.
I also (shameless plug) occasionally cover social gaming and design issues at http://t-machine.org, but at the moment on those topics I’m mostly just doing detailed writeups of other people’s talks
, and keeping quiet for myself.
PS: this blog doesn’t allow hyperlinks in comments. Sorry, you’ll have to copy/paste.
adam
11 Jun 08 at 9:24 am