Open Profiles
This is something I never understood why someone hasn’t done yet (to my knowledge). Part of gaming is showing off how l33t(3l33t,leet,elite 3|_337, etc) you are to your friends. So why don’t games have badges or little banners that players can put on their blogs, in their forum posts?
You first give players a way to show off to their friends their character/account details and second, you get free advertising. Make the images links back to the game and presto; You players get a nifty badge, and you get link backs.
You can also do similar things for alliances/faction/groups in the game. Opening just info even just a little would let the players build apps I’m sure to read this data and track their friends/enemies. I’ve played games (most notable, Earth 2025) where players take raw HTML and use it to keep track of alliance members.
May be interesting. Thoughts?
edit:
RangerSheck has written a nice article on making an igoogle gadget badge. check it @ : http://rangersheck.com/2008/7/24/an-igoogle-gadget-for-your-game
Thinking about why
Don’t worry. I’m not gonna get all philosophical on ya’s with why we exist, but why I and others, play web games. I have talked about this several times before on this blog, but I want to reapproach it again.
So I have been playing several games online and they are pretty good. Nothing spectacular, but they are enjoyable. Anyways, there flaws are starting to show, particularly in the multiplayer departments. THESE ARE MULITPLAYER GAMES! You think they would put a lot of effort into actually playing and communicating with others. But like most games, these ones drop the ball.
Now here is a game theory question for ya’s. Do you ‘force’/strongly encourage the player to perform an action, or do you wait until they decide?
Let me elaborate. If you are playing a strategy game online, why attack another player? You steal some resources. But then you are likely to be attacked in return. And you are surely losing resources for attacking/maintaining an army.
But what if you were to give the players a reason to attack the other players. Such as the only way for anyone to get military experience is to do so through attacking, and that experience is needed to develop new, better weapons.
There also needs to be more thought into the point of the game. Too many games I have played where your sole goal is to be the best player in the game, which pretty much equals “whoever spends the most time ingame wins” style gameplay.
Do I have any better idea’s of the top of my head? Not relly, but an example would be give the players several different paths to play and allow them to try and reach the top in their now paths (Military, research, Political, etc). Make these paths balanced some how and make it advantageous for players of different paths to work together.
You’re still striving to be the best, but it’s just cut the gamae population in third and given you a chance to play the way you want to play and would hopefully be worked in such a way that just because you have no life and spend 12 hours a day playing the game doesn’t mean you’re going to be the best.
So, what are you guys think? Encourage/force cooperation, interaction, conflict, or just wait for the players to decide to do something
