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<channel><generator>iloblog 1.0</generator><title>Play Now Feed</title><link>http://blog.vivacity-games.co.uk/</link><description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Game Development Blog for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.vivacity-games.co.uk&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;Vivacity Games&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</description><item><title>Once Upon a Time... (The Story of Splintered Rock)</title><link>http://iloapp.vivacity-games.co.uk/blog/blog?Home&amp;post=1</link><description><![CDATA[  After my first couple of weeks in Second Life (SL) I strongly suspected it could be the ideal platform for hobbyists to develop a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game or just MMO, for short. SL would be the 3D graphics engine and also provide instant and offline messaging, account-maintenance and payment infrastructure and leaving the developer to focus on ‘look’, ‘feel’ and game mechanics and of course exploring some of the elements of design that are too risky for commercial MMOs (character death, anyone?  ). 
 With that in mind I joined a role-playing group who were dedicated to re-creating the world of Frank Herbert's 'Dune' - a sci fi world which commands great praise from fans but which has been underused in computer and online gaming. 
 After six months the owner and co-creator of 'The Dune Project' (as it was known) realised he was not going to be able to maintain his commitments and so decided to sell the sim to any member of the community who wish to take it on and ensure the survival of the project. I saw this as the perfect opportunity to see if my suspicions about Second Life as an online RPG development platform were accurate and stepped forward. 
 The development of Splintered Rock is the story of what happened next ... 
 (to be continued...)    
 ]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 11 May 2010 19:33:11 +0100</pubDate><category>Splintered Rock - Dev Notes</category></item><item><title>Comparing Second Life Roleplay and Commercial MMORPGs</title><link>http://iloapp.vivacity-games.co.uk/blog/blog?Home&amp;post=0</link><description><![CDATA[  In 2009 Massively ran some interviews with online Role Playing Game (RPG) developers and producers in their series of blogs titled " Redefining MMOs ". In particular, Jeffrey Steefel, Executive Producer of Lord of The Rings Online included a nice list of ‘ingredients’ for a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG or just MMO for short). 
 His list was: 
 · Persistence 
 · Sense of Place 
 · Sense of Purpose 
 · Social Connectivity 
 · Social Identity 
 · Social Grouping 
 · Participatory Experience 
 · Storytelling 
 I thought it would be interesting to rate a commercial MMORPG with the typical role-play experience one can find in Second Life (SL) on each of these factors. Unfortunately, Mr Steefel didn’t provide any interpretation to go with his list so the first step is to provide my own definitions: I stess that the interpretations below are mine and not Mr Steefel’s. 
  Persistence : the world remains online and inhabited by others even when a player logs off. It is also around week after week and year after year. 
  Sense of Place : ideally, players should feel that when they play, their characters inhabit a place that is just as real as the real world. The virtual world that is created in the game should give enough cues that it strongly suggests a real or imaginary place. 
  Sense of Purpose : the world provides, either implicitly or explicitly, a variety of actions and activities that players can engage in which will benefit their character in some way. 
  Social Connectivity : the ability for players to easily find and contact other players who have valid reasons for interacting with them. 
  Social Identity : the player is able to develop a strong identity for their character through making choices in the avatar appearance, allying themselves with ‘political’ forces that are present in the world and in effects that they are able to have on the world. 
  Social Grouping : a player feels a valued part of a community, either a small team dedicated to achieving a short-term goal or the body of players who inhabit the world and play the game. 
  Participatory Experience : all players feel they 'have a part to play' that is more or less equal to everyone else in the game. 
  Storytelling : players are the authors of their own story. They may also work together to produce an interactively constructed story arc or a collection of small improvised episodes which contribute to the overall theme. 
 For the comparison it seemed appropriate to select Lord of the Rings Online (LoTRO) as the typical commercial MMORPG: it's the game Mr Steefel produces, a game that is consistently in the top 10 MMORPGs in terms of popularity and, most importantly, a game I also play and so know well. The scores for Second Life roleplaying are based on my own experience of 3 years of sci fi roleplaying (and game development) in Second Life. In the table (below) I have rated each of the factors on a scale of 1 to 5. I explain the justification for the scores below. 
   
  Persistence  
 LoTRO scores well because its servers are up all day and every day (with occasional planned outages for maintenance). In addition, the game world has been accessible for over 3 years and probably will be accessible for several years more. Compare this with a typical roleplaying region (known as a sim) in Second Life which is owned and run as a hobby by an individual who has to find a hundred dollars a month or more to pay for the sim and may have to fit all the organisational and community management duties around a full-time job or college work and/or family responsibilities. It is not surprising that many roleplay areas in Second Life don’t last more than a year. On top of that, the Second Life servers have a reputation for requiring unscheduled maintenance, although the amount of downtime is comparable with commercial MMOs.  
  Sense of Place  
 LoTRO can build on the sense of place created by the genius and lifetime of work of Professor Tolkien as well as a phenomenally successful cinema interpretation of his literary works. In Second Life, it is often difficult to provide a sense of place with the limited builds that are affordable to the hobbyist. On top of this, owners of intellectual property have demonstrated that they are willing to defend their ‘brand’ even against hobbyists in virtual worlds. Indeed, my own roleplay game development efforts in Second Life have been the target of such  intellectual property enforcement . One further complicating factor is that in Second Life players have absolute control over their appearance. Any background which requires players to adopt a certain appearance (for example: a medieval-looking human) may have its sense of place continually challenged by visitors who don’t know about, or refuse to follow the ‘dress code’ and walk around in a bikini or with animal ears and a tail! In summary, many Second Life roleplay sims are idiosyncratic creations that can find it difficult to convey a recognizable sense of place to players. 
  Sense of Purpose  
 LoTRO offers a typical 'structured' play experience consisting of a series of quests, combat with randomly spawned computer controlled creatures and a resource gathering and crafting system. Second Life is a virtual world that offers building and communication tools but no structure at all regarding how they are used. It is the ultimate ‘sandbox game’. Some SL users have built game systems which incorporate some of the standard structured play found in MMOs, the most widely used are combat systems which allow players to fight each other and some character progression system to encourage player engagement with the system. Many of these systems are well programmed and tested but they often require considerable input of time and patience from the sim owner to ensure a ‘fair’ environment where they can be used. This is because all players have access to the programming environment that the systems are built with, so it is not a particularly difficult task to figure out how to hack in to game systems or even to just ‘do annoying stuff’ (and sadly some players seem to have decided that this is actually the purpose of Second Life!!). 
  Social Connectivity  
 LoTRO has a good set of tools which players can use to find other players who are online and doing the same quests. Perfect for the game! Second Life has a good set of tools to allow groups of players to communicate in various ways and let each other know a bit about themselves, or at least their avatars. The problem in second life is trying to find people you think you might want to play with. Without being able to fall back on the focus of a directed quest system, Second Life needs to look at the ways Social networking sites are learning to facilitate connections between their users, but at the moment there is no sign of that. Most roleplayers in Second Life resign themselves to weeks of ‘getting to know’ the other players on a sim and it maybe only after considerable investment in time that they realize they don’t actually share the focus and goals of most of the other players on the sim! 
  Social Identity  
 As with many commercial MMOs the avatars used by the players are somewhat restricted in the ways they can be customised in LoTRO. After playing for a while, one avatar of a certain class or race starts to look very similar to another. Not so in Second Life! It is almost unimaginable to think that two avatars could be identical, and although it is possible, actually trying to impersonate someone else’s avatar would be quite a challenge. 
  Social Grouping  
 In LoTRO players come together to undertake a quest and to form guilds. The quest groups are short-lived and the players often don’t ever meet again after the group disbands. Guilds are communities where guild members get to know each other and real friendships are made (and broken). I don’t have any fact or figures to back it up, but I suspect that most players' experience of social grouping involves the short-lived quest group and only a small percentage of players go on to join and actively participate in guilds. On the contrary, in Second Life invites to join groups and offers of in-world friendship are commonplace from the moment someone creates their Second Life account and steps in-world. It is interesting that in both Second Life and LoTRO, players often resort to web-based collaboration tools (forums, photo sharing spaces etc) outside the game platform to build their community. 
  Participatory Experience  
 In LoTRO there are occasional events and groups working on a quest which players can participate in, but beyond that very little else except involvement in a guild. The potential for participation in Second Life is huge. Players can help create the roleplay world either by building it, designing it and making it feel real by playing in it. 
  Storytelling  
 LoTRO has a wealth of story woven into its quests and a special series of quests which puts the player on the center-stage of a heroic saga. But that is nothing compared to the potential of Second Life where a group of players can create their own setting, characters, costumes, vehicles and write, act and even film their own story. 
  Conclusion  
 Second Life has the technical potential to create all the 'ingredients' for an MMO that Jeffrey Steefel lists but there are many areas which will require significant investment of time and money in order to offer a level of engagement to players. While rating the roleplay expereince in SL with that found in MMORPG it seems that there is also a complementary distribution of the areas which are rated highly. In particular, commercial MMOs do the 'world creation' and 'structured play experience' well, while roleplay in SL excels at 'character customisiation' and 'storytelling'. In addition, the problem of building and managing a community of like-minded players is something that neither SL or commercial MMOs seem to have addressed satisfactorily. 
 Finally, a thought: If we have a game that can excel in all of the areas that Jeffrey Steefel listed, would we be looking at the next generation of online roleplaying games? 
 ]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 09 May 2010 20:58:21 +0100</pubDate><category>Online Roleplay Games</category></item></channel>
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