The Game Design section

It has taken me almost a year, but the Game Design section of the site has seen truly massive revisions.

Among other things, I have managed to find several presentations which were never on the site:

“Reinventing MMOs,” which is more or less a high-level explanation and justification of the Metaplace technology stack.
“High Windows,” the long-lost Worlds in Motion keynote that is probably my most controversial talk ever.
“SciFi MMPs,” done jointly with Chris Klug, that’s the closest thing to a postmortem of Star Wars Galaxies as you are likely to find
My Games for Change closing address, now fully transcribed.

In addition, there are now videos and audio attached to many of the existing presentations; if they were posted for free on GDCVault or elsewhere, I have embeded the video or audio there in the page alongside the slides. Most slides have been re-exported for higher quality.

It’s not all in presentations, either. I went through the blog archives and found a host of interviews and panels and whatnot that had never been archived, including many on Metaplace and SWG and MMOs in general, and also the recent panel I moderated at GDCNext on indie grassroots marketing. So now that page is also much better; I think there may have been as many as a dozen new additions, actually. There are even a couple of essays that had never been gathered up on the site, such as the one I did for Penny Arcade where they asked me to design a construction MMO.

All in all, it was a massive endeavor. I hope that designers, scholars, and players each might find something interesting or useful in there. To be honest, I was kind of shocked by the sheer volume of it all.

Still missing: an actual ludography. I’ll get around to that at some point. In the meantime, it’s all available from the menu up top.