Over at Only a Game today, a discussion of three kinds of anonymity – alone, unknown, and unguarded – that compares the original online worlds of MUDs to Twitter and Facebook. Here’s an extract:

The MUD was the direct precursor to Facebook and Twitter, which descend from earlier copies of the chatroom concept, such as AOL’s offering, which lacked the fictional world but kept the name. Yet abuse in MUDs was comparatively rare, and rapidly resolved by Wizards whenever it occurred. Anonymity may still have fostered abuse, but the systems were in place in MUDs both to guard against it, and to discourage it from happening in the first place. The most effective deterrent against online abuse is community – and the MUDs fostered this far more than the latest digital public spaces.

You can read the entirety of Lessons from the MUD over at Only a Game.

Over at Only a Game today, a discussion of cyborg tenacity that includes discussion of Pokémon Go and Xbox’s Gamescore. Here’s an extract:

Gamification risks stultification because the game developer (or behavioural engineer) is specifying what is being learned, and there is no engagement of the will of the player (or employee). Submission is the inevitable outcome of this failure to create a common vision. What’s more, through mandatory achievements and scoring systems like Xbox’s Gamerscore we have witnessed the gamification of games... an emphasis on cyber-submission over the more engaging alternatives. This state of affairs is now endemic in software design: what is Twitter and Facebook’s Follow counters if not an invitation to judge quantity over quality?

You can read the entirety of Tenacity and the Domination of Things over at Only a Game.

Over on Psychochild’s Blog, Brian Green has a fantastic four part series exploring the relationship between privacy and anonymity, and arguing against the idea that removing anonymity would address the problem – both because this means giving up privacy, which we value, and because it is not practical to do so. Highly recommended reading for game designers and anyone interested in online abuse and privacy:

• Part 1 looks at the relationship between privacy and anonymity, and the key questions about anonymity.
• Part 2 examines the harms entailed in removing anonymity.
• Part 3 makes the case for the impossibility for enforcing public identity and restricting anonymity.
• Part 4 looks at dealing with the problems of online behaviour, and the changes that might be required.

You can read some brief responses from me over at Only a Game, and I shall respond in full in about two weeks time with a piece entitled Lessons from the MUD. Watch this space!

Over at Kotaku, Paul Walker-Emig has a wonderful piece on my first game as lead designer and writer, Discworld Noir. It’s called Discworld Noir: The Greatest Detective Game Ever Made, which is very flattering, especially since (as Paul admits) this game is mostly unknown, or otherwise forgotten. Here’s an extract from the start of the piece:

The forgotten Discworld Noir’s greatness hangs on a simple design element: the notebook. All the other artefacts of the hardboiled detective are there in this noir-inflected take on Terry Pratchett’s Discworld: the trenchcoat and trilby protagonist Lewton wears, treading through the rain that forever hammers the streets; a femme fatale straight from the big book of archetypes; storylines and characters taken wholesale from the pages of Chandler and Hammett; a cool jazz soundtrack evocative of the golden age of the PI. But it is clues and deduction that define the detective. There is the notebook, and then everything else is superficial.

What’s more, Paul’s piece has flushed out some Discworld Noir fans from the woodwork! Here’s a tweet by Dave Gilbert* (The Shivah, The Blackwell Legacy, Emerald City Confidential) confessing that Noir was an influence:

This means a great deal to me, not only because Dave is a brilliant indie developer, but because I’ve always lamented not having influenced anyone else’s design work. The notebook in Noir, as Paul draws out, was a a big moment for me as a game designer and narrative designer, and I was always disappointed that it sunk without a trace. It seems this was not the case!

You can read the entirety of Discworld Noir: The Greatest Detective Game Ever Made over at Kotaku.

*Not that Dave Gilbert, the other one with the really amazing indie career.

Delighted to announce that I am on a five State tour of the US this April, with four speaking engagements open to the public. I shall be presenting at four university campuses in Indiana, Texas, California, and Utah with an hour long presentation on The Meaning of Play. Most of the venues are open to the general public, so even if you're not a student at the universities in question you'd be more than welcome to come along.

My topic for this tour is The Meaning of Play, an imaginative voyage through five hundred million years of play, using the latest empirical and philosophical research to trace the aesthetic motives that inspire beings to pursue play, and the lineages connecting the different kinds of play that these motives brought about. The journey will look at the aesthetic motives of the first multi-cellular life forms back in the Cambrian, how early wolves created new meanings for play a million years ago, the relationship between games today and games five millennia in the past, and how humans continue to create new and different means to – and meanings of – play.

Here are all the places you can catch me this April. Some details are still being confirmed and will be updated soon, so watch this space!

Tuesday 4th April: Indiana University, Bloomington, IN

Franklin Hall Commons, 1 pm 
Open to all

Thursday 6th April: Texas A&M, College Station, TX

Langford B Geren Auditorium, 7:45 pm
Open to all

Sunday 9th April: Laguna College of Art and Design, CA

Studio 5, Big Bend Campus, 2825 Laguna Canyon Rd, 1pm 
Open to all

Wednesday 12th April: University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT

EAE Games Studio, Building 72, Level 2, 5 pm
Open to all

With thanks to Erlend Grefsrud for goading me into this title. The opening image is Play by Jan Rasiewicz, which I found here at his site, Rasko Fine Art. As ever, no copyright infringement is intended and I will take the image down if asked.

Cross-posted from Only a Game.