Comments on: A “Gamers’ Manifesto” & RPG World-Building

By: heather

heather — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 17:02:25 +0000

Nifty. I like that! Kind of like creating the layers of an onion from the inside out.

By: yunk

yunk — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 15:09:50 +0000

About the same subject as your husbands’ article: There is another interesting article in Dragon magazine from .. oh probably the early/mid 80s, called The Making of a Milieu, that mainly deals with the map and countries and people. He wrote one way to make a world is to create the geography. After you have your geography map, make a few dozen photocopies. Then start out way back in the early bronze age, or earlier, and start filling in the regions, countries, cities, etc. Then , make more maps, each jumping forward a few hundred years. Each iteration, you can have empires begin to rise and ultimately fall, barbarians sweep across your lands. And each time, the names of your locations may change slightly, to reflect the language of the invaders. Perhaps some cities will be abandoned, then you’ll know where the ruins are, and why they are there. New roads and trade routes will be put in.

Sort of like creating a character, you create a world, and let it grow and change on its own, and not only does it open up possibilities you wouldn’t have thought of, but then you also know why everything is the way it is.

By: heather

heather — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 10:10:34 +0000

So far I really love the results of what he’s done—it truly does give the world that medieval feel of being vast and unfathomable, despite the fact that the presence of magic allows for greater travel than in real-world history.

By: ScottM

ScottM — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 18:58:05 +0000

I liked the Case Study in Stealing From Real World history– I hope that successor articles continue the example. I liked the way he generated the country sizes, though using sizes of the era [usually much much smaller, at least in Western Europe] would have made for an interesting difference.

Of course, as he pointed out, that just gives him another interesting difference to solve…

By: heather

heather — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 16:25:41 +0000

Aaron: Hehe. One of the things that amused me about DDO was the presence of such crates. It seemed… so odd. And I have to agree with his rant on save points—save points always drove me insane.

Chessack: Yeah, and the sad part is, that’s probably what a lot of buyers want. How long ’til the move now?

By: Chessack

Chessack — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 15:47:55 +0000

Wow, that is a great article. The crates part made me laugh out loud.

But just in general, the guy has a lot of very good points to make about games. I particularly appreciated his comments about the AI, and about how all that extra power in CPUs is being used, not to make the AI smarter, but to make the stupid AI’s clothes more realistic looking, etc.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 16:02:54 +0000

Awesome. Here’s my favorite quote:

“When we’re on our deathbeds, we’re going to wish we could reclaim the time we spent wandering around for save points long after we were done playing every night. Imagine if your word processing program did this, refusing to let you save your progress until you typed six more paragraphs. Or, made you retype your last paragraph six times while zombies tried to shoot your cursor… ”

I loved the part on crates. Right now, I can’t think of a single FPS or RPG I’ve played that didn’t have crates lying around.

I have to disagree with him on Nintendo and gaming-vs-multimedia though. I grew up on the Nintendo consoles and was pretty loyal to the brand until I finally traded in my Gamecube (I sitll have the other consoles). It was a shortage of fun, lasting games that made me leave Nintendo behind. I think I wrote a full blog on the subject once.