The blog of late has gone in what might seem to be a rather weird place. While I’ve had a number of posts directly related to game development and the game industry, I’ve also talked a lot about things that seem unrelated to game development. Yet, there is a reason for this, and I would like to take a moment to look at some of these past articles and to put them into perspective as far as game development goes. After all, my focus is on game communities, and it is due to that, you’ll be seeing a number of topics related to social networking and Internet technologies on this site. At the same time, I’m also writing this to relate those bits of news to the game industry.
For example, the Facebook change. People hated it, I made a blog post about it, but I don’t think I went into enough detail. I said why I thought it was expected, and while that has a general meaning, what does it say about game development in general? Well, for one, change is bad. People aren’t fond of it. Whenever you see a patch for an MMO, you inevitably see one thing: a whole lot of complaints – at lest if you change anything significant to the game.
Does that mean that the changes were bad? No, not necessarily – although they might be. It just means that people dislike it when you change something familiar to them. Added functionality is one thing, but this really speaks to usability and familiarity in UI design specifically. If you have an MMO with a certain UI, and you decide to revamp it entirely… People are likely going to be resistant if they are use to the old one. The new one might be better, but that doesn’t mean people will like it immediately.
That goes for gameplay changes too. Heck, just look at Star Wars Galaxies for a change from something familiar to something new. The New Game Experience was hated by many players, even though you could certainly argue that it made for a better game — not that I necessarily am, I like skill-based advancement, but I will admit the original combat system was pretty terrible. If the game was originally designed with the NGE in mind, it would have likely gone over just fine. If it came out within a few days of lunch (unlikely as that would be) it also would have been fine – except for the bad press it would likely generate. Yet, people would probably have taken to it fine and might have even considered it better.
Basically, the reason why I am looking closely at social networking sites is because they’re basically the same thing as online gaming when it comes to community on certain levels. Not all levels, but in some ways, we can see parallels between services like Facebook and Twitter, and what we see in online game comunities.
