Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 12:27 pm on 11/21/2005
If you’re like me, you enjoy reading text articles in a web browser. So you’ll be happy to hear that we relaunched KeepMedia, and the relaunch includes a great deal more free stuff. For instance, right now, our archive page for the sporadically correct Reason magazine offers a great article on the war between Prozac and a society with an increasingly Calvinist medical outlook. And it’s free, for now and for always. You’ll see good stuff in Psychology Today, the Atlantic and sometimes Esquire as well.
This relaunch is a start, and no doubt contains things that (still) suck, but we worked hard on it and I’m pretty happy.
link here
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 1:10 am on
Someone really ought to create a cocktail called the Florida Voter.
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Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 9:11 pm on 11/9/2005
Lately I have been thinking that web games suck, which is a problem, because it’s obviously untrue. I mean, there are lots of great casual Flash games… or at least there are fifteen great casual Flash games, you know, the ones you see over and over on every Flash-games site because of the crazy affiliate-marketing deals they all make with each other. And there’s more great gameplay coming out of downloadable indie PC games than there’s ever been… when you can find it… at all. (I hope Mr. Costikyan addresses this problem as well as he hopes to.)
The split between “casual†and “hardcore†gaming leaves a huge gulf in between: people like me. Okay, maybe not huge compared to the market for casual games, but I’m part of a grossly underserved market at least as large as the hardcore PC gaming crowd. When I play casual games, I find myself wanting more substance, meatier gameplay, but when I play a PC game, I typically don’t end up playing it for long because it’s simply too complex, too stressful or too hard.
The latter is what worries me more. The phenomenon of “squeezing the base†– trying to get more out of your few most fanatical customers rather than taking a smaller amount from each member of a larger group – nearly killed comic books in the nineties, isn’t doing great things for politics if you ask me, and seems always to have been the case in many geek cultures such as gaming. Combine it with the phenomenon of genre addiction and the problem just gets worse. People who love gameplay, but aren’t prepared to devote our whole lives to it, are left in the middle.
Fortunately, the task of delivering a game to the Excluded Middle is a task that anyone with a solid grasp of best practices in software development and UI is ready to take on (provided that they love games). Want proof? Here’s a checklist of what I want in a game:
- It should be delivered in the web browser. That’s where I’m bopping around looking for stuff anyway, so putting it right in the page is just easier. It’s also arguably easier for the developer to serve up a game this way. I will download something or launch a Java applet in a pinch – and these days, a pinch is what I’m in – but only when I think it’s gonna nail the rest of the list.
- It should have a strong, original theme. This is more important than lots of great artwork or 3D – looking great is always a plus, but there’s more than one way to do it. “Original” does not mean your own Tolkienesque fantasy world, or your Final Fantasy-esque anime universe.
- The fun should start quickly. Do not make me configure eighteen zillion things first. Making a bunch of decisions that I cannot possibly be informed about yet is not fun.
- That said, the game should feel a bit bigger than I am. I like having some space to wander around in the gameplay and discover things.
- There should never be a long, hard road between me and the next fun. Urban Dead, I’m looking at you, but I’m also looking at Kingdom of Loathing. Grinds are so 2002. Not even the frequently high-quality humor of KoL could disguise the fact that it is basically a treadmill of getting to the next level so you could… get to the level after that.
- The game should respect my time. That is, players should not be proportionately rewarded for how much time they spend playing the game. I have a life to lead here. (This is the only really hard game-design problem on the list, in my opinion.)
- Along the same lines, I should be able to log in for 60 seconds, do something fun, and then forget about it. From my cell phone, if I want.
- There should be a reasonably satisfying single-player mode of play. You shouldn’t need other people just to do something fun.
- No more zombies, pirates, or ninjas. Robots and monkeys will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
I could go on, but you get the gist. If you know of a good game that sort of fits this mold, feel free to talk about it here.
link here
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 5:29 pm on 11/8/2005
I’m giving serious thought to unraveling this site’s current page-at-a-time-of-text-bits, newest-at-the-top model (which model is of course known as a weblog). ‘Cause, you know, a design that always emphasizes my latest thing really just reminds me how scattered and dillettante-ish I am most of the time.
The nice thing about modern blog frameworks is I can change all this with a little code-shuffling. I’d keep the RSS feeds, of course; their whole purpose is to tell you when something is new, so it’d be foolish to mess with that.
Any thoughts on what kind of ontology would actually make sense here? I fear divvying things up into “Tech” and “Other”… wouldn’t want anyone to think I’m one-dimensional. Or something.
link here