Gamasutra is evidently launching a new feature, concerning the preservation of old video games and materials pertaining thereto. And to help inaugurate the feature, they’ve enlisted none other than Warren Spector to offer his opinions on the subject:

“Unlike earlier media, like film and television, which were born at a time when historians and academics tended to focus on an established canon of ‘important’ works and ‘great men,’ video games were born at a time when the cultural gatekeepers were more open to new ideas, new thinking and new media.”

“Where the early history of film and television has been largely lost thanks to industry indifference and academic ignorance, we have a chance to preserve our history, before our pioneers pass away, our design documents, marketing materials and beta builds disintegrate or get trashed, and our hardware deteriorates to the point of inoperability. The fact is, over the last 40 years or so, we’ve seen the rise of the first new medium of expression and communication since the rise of television and not to preserve our history would be a crime.”

Spector also comments on what the biggest obstacle to such an effort would be. And though he does discuss the cost of such an effort as well, it’s not what he sees as the biggest problem:

“The biggest threat is indifference. Most people making games see what they do as ephemeral, as not worthy of preservation. Who cares about an early design doc for any one of the thousands of games released each year? Why bother saving a T-shirt given out at E3 to promote the release of a game? Will anyone ever care about the September 1st draft of the schedule for a Mickey Mouse game?”

I can’t speak to the Epic Mickey context, but I will note that we have, in the galleries here at Aiera, several documents — some of them about as mundane as a project schedule — which emerged from the development processes of various Ultima games. Including, it should be noted, a few that Spector himself worked on.

Anyhow, Gamasutra has already gone live with their new feature, and evidently has commentary from Richard Garriott as well. (I’ll see if I can get around to posting an excerpt from that later today or some time tomorrow.)

Reckoning

RPS reviews Reckoning.
More Reckoning reviews.
Even more Reckoning reviews!
And why not…one more Reckoning review!

The tone and tenor of reviews in this batch is definitely much more on the positive side of things, with scores tending to be in the 80% or better range (although Entertainment Weekly didn’t particularly care for the game). One notable highlight is Ten Ton Hammer’s mention of the game’s “anti-grind” formula — the game really has been architected in a way that lets you level up by completing quests, rather than by having to kill countless scores of monsters.

GameBanshee had a lot to say about the game as well, in a four-page review. Here’s a couple of choice quotes:

The odd thing is, Reckoning actually gets better as it goes. Most games are front-loaded with their content, mostly because they want to impress gamers right out of the gate – after all, most players don’t finish games and they want to see all the cool stuff to justify their purchasing decisions right off the bat. Reckoning starts out as an okay action-RPG with some good combat, but the early focus on side-questing around monotonous forests and caves doesn’t do it too many favors. However, stick with it long enough and the game’s better elements creeep out of the woodwork. The game’s first city, Ysa, marks the turning point, and is when the story really begins to come together. Many players may not get that far, which is a real shame as it’s when Reckoning hits its stride; frankly, it should have happened five hours in instead of 25.

And:

All of this that I say about Reckoning’s repetition is worth bearing in mind, but there’s a flip-side to the game that also makes it one of the best action-RPGs seen in years. Though the action-RPG genre has always struggled to marry fast-paced, responsive combat with the depth and breadth of a genuine RPG character system, Reckoning might well be the first game that really succeeds at it. Part of this comes down to the fact that that combat is up there with other dedicated action games like God of War in terms of fluidity and responsiveness, and part of it also comes down to the fact that it doesn’t cut out the role-playing in the name of that action. Reckoning provides a very solid stable of both combat-oriented character development and non-combat options, and it makes previous attempts like The Witcher 2 and Divinity II look clunky and awkward in comparison.

Reckoning is dominating the UK sales charts, at least.

Which, I suppose, isn’t really that surprising, given the game’s heavy reliance on Celtic and English influences in its characters and architecture. It really is quite a contrast with the generally Nordic & Germanic trends in other RPG series.

A World Without Reckoning.

GameBanshee’s Eric Schwarz discusses the game at Gamasutra, and draws out what seems to be a fairly common criticism of it — that it’s almost the first single-player MMORPG:

Aside from the sheer size of the world, Reckoning also does some curious things regarding the structure of that world – namely, it draws very heavy inspiration from MMORPGs. As mentioned above, the world is broke up into distinct zones, connected by convenient canyons and passes that are probably serve both technical and gameplay functions. The player’s progress across the map is more or less west-to-east, with things opening up a little bit more at the midgame point as the player’s objectives expand.

…

Most lacking from Reckoning, I think, is that sense of emotional attachment. At one point in the game, the player is given the option of destroying the town of Canneroc, a small silk-harvesting village in the middle of a spider-infested wood. In a more traditional RPG, the decision to destroy this town would not be something taken lightly: chances are the player would have spent some time there, got to know its residents, its place in the world, been given some sort of investment into its well-being, etc. However, in Reckoning, it’s just another quest hub to move on from, and whether it continues to exist or not has no impact on the game as a whole. What could have been an interesting moral decision is cheapened significantly by the lack of gameplay repercussions and the structure of the game itself.

I think it’s very strange that Reckoning subscribes to this MMO-style world design. As a single-player game driven largely by its quests, story and exploration factor, there’s very little reason for players not to want to complete every bit of content (at least in theory). Even if a zone’s enemies are cannon fodder, or the loot is no good, players want to be able to tick those quests off one by one. By segregating the game world in this manner, there’s a fundamental conflict of interest between the world design and the motivations of players in navigating it.

And to be fair, there’s an air of validity to his criticisms…although it’s worth noting that inasmuch as modern MMO world design inherits from the Ultima Online tradition, it inherits from a tradition that intended to transpose the large, open world of a single player RPG universe into a multiplayer context. Although, to be fair, MMOs have iterated and permuted how the open world concept is handled quite a bit.

The criticism of the lack of moral impact of a decision in the game is…you know what? I think I might have said this before, but I (for one) am glad that Reckoning doesn’t make much of a bother about moral decision-making. Not that I don’t like that mechanic in games when it’s there…but it’s nice to have a break from it, too. And, as I am sure I said before, it fits in with the lore of the world. Because really, what is morality in a fully deterministic, fully predestined world? What is a murderer, in such a world? It’s not like he could choose not to kill the other person, after all. Does such a one have moral agency?

Is Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning the “most accessible RPG ever”?

CNET actually posed the question, and the consensus at their end tends toward a positive response to the question. GameBanshee doesn’t quite agree, although their disagreements mostly focus on quibbles over the PC version’s controls. Which, yes, are a bit different from the standard WASD-based control scheme that has become typical in PC RPGs…but which are hardly an insurmountable (or even a significant) hurdle as far as getting into the game is concerned.

Will Reckoning have a sequel?

We already know the answer to this question!

Yes. Yes, it will.

Feel just a little bit more like James Bond, thanks to Brookstone!

The next time you’re through an airport with an extra $250 in tow, why not pick yourself up a pair of WiFi-enabled cufflinks.

That’s right: they’re silver cufflinks with little WiFi USB access points hidden in them. Or, well, included in them; they’re not really hidden per se.

But still!

Zynga is losing up to $150 per new paying customer.

I wish I could say I feel bad for them, but I really don’t like Zynga.

Marketing costs, in case you’re wondering, appear to be what’s doing them in. They’re spending more to show off their wares than they are pulling in with new purchasers of same. Gee, darn, eh?

Related: What’s a maker of imitation games to do when the chips are down and money is going out the door? How about online gambling?

Speaking of Zynga’s penchant for building clones of other successful games in the social, mobile, and casual spaces…

Props to Nimblebit for their tact!

So has everyone heard of Bioshock Infinite’s “1999 mode”?

A new post on the Bioshock Infinite blog describes the new mode. “With every choice you make, there are irreversible implications,” the post says. “If your choices guide you down a path not suited to your play style, you will suffer for it.”

Bioshock’s distant cousin, System Shock 2 was released in 1999, and the new difficulty mode promises strict resource limits that may prove familiar to long-time Shock fans. Combat specialisation will be an important factor, too. Irrational say that “you’ll need to develop them efficiently and effectively throughout the story; any weapon will be useless to you unless you have that specialization.”

The post also says that your health will be “set to an entirely different baseline.” Unlike some hardcore modes, your progress won’t be wiped on death, however. Ken Levine says “there are game saves, and you’re gonna f***cking need them.”

I take it you’ve all heard about the MegaUpload shutdown?

Who needs SOPA and PIPA? It would seem that extant laws are quite suited to taking file-sharing websites offline as is!

I’m of two minds about the takedown, personally. One one hand, MegaUpload was a visually offensive monstrosity that I never quite felt save grabbing files from, no matter how convenient it was that the service was there. On the other hand, I’m not exactly a huge piracy fan, am I…and I am well aware that there was lots of pirated material being hosted through the site. There was also lots of legitimate material, and I’m not trying to say that the takedown was the right thing to do…but neither am I saying that the authorities involved lacked for a case according to extant laws.

End of an era: Kodak goes bankrupt.

I…okay, here, I have no words. As an amateur photographer, I recognized Kodak as an icon of the photography industry (although, as a digital photographer shooting on a Canon system, I haven’t actually had a use for Kodak products since the last millenium).

Ubisoft has one of the ugliest, most restrictive DRM schemes going…

…but I’m sure we’re all relieved to know that the “vast majority” of their customers never experience DRM-related problems.

Because that is reassuring, and stuff.

Life on Venus?

That is evidently what at least one Russian scientist is claiming, based on evidence (pictures, mostly) sent back by the short-lived probe the Russians sent to that planet back in 1982.

What can social gameplay offer to different player types?

Gamasutra looks at results from a recent “player motivation factors” survey conducted by Relentless Software and Vertical Slice. For those of you wondering what Richard Garriott is probably thinking about on a fairly constant basis in regard to his upcoming “Ultimate RPG”, this is a decent article to read through.

Origin is EA-exclusive no more!

Eleven new publishers and some number of non-EA games have been added to Electronic Arts’ digital distribution service.

My question is: can I import keys for non-EA games available through Origin from other digital distribution services? I only ask because every EA game I purchased through Impulse could be added to my Origin account simply by providing the game’s registration key. It would be cool if I could do that with any non-EA games I own which Origin has for sale.

Australia may add an R18+ game rating this year!

You know, so games like Syndicate (the new one) can be sold there.

Apple might have just set the new standard in EULA “dick moves”.

And yes, I know that’s a tall damn statement, but let me explain.

You see, with Apple’s newly-launched iBooks Author application, you have two choices as an author looking to distribute your new work that you’ve just completed with it. You can distribute it through any other digital bookselling service beside’s Apple’s…but you can only do so by offering the work for free. If you want to charge for your work, you have to use Apple’s iBooks storefront…exclusively. You can’t later start selling your work through another service, once it’s hit the iBookstore.

Ars Technica smells a possible antitrust suit. I’m inclined to agree.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown video interview!

GameInformer sits down with the legendary Sid Meier to talk about the upcoming remake of the tactical sci-fi game.

Minecraft-themed LEGO is coming!

The proposal for the creation of Minecraft-themed LEGO sets has passed review, it would seem, meaning that the proposal is now officially on its way to becoming an actual LEGO product.

Imagine that: a whole box full of the 1×1 LEGO pieces. Thousands and thousands of them. Or, well, a hundred or so. It is LEGO, after all.

The twelve best games on PC?

Well, according to Kotaku, at least. Prepare an appropriate quantity of salt grains before watching.

Jar Jar Binks saved Star Wars?

Okay, 1UP wasn’t dumb enough to actually assert that the nasal-voiced Rastafarian Gungan was the element — the necessary change-up, the dramatic shift — that kept the Star Wars series from sliding into obscurity and the dustbin of history.

But they did just publish an article arguing that Diablo saved CRPGs. Which is basically saying the same thing, only in a way that doesn’t sound so obviously stupid.

Tomorrow, they’ll be publishing another feature expounding on the reasons why Star Trek: Nemesis saved the sci-fi franchise Gene Roddenberry created. Okay, not really…but it’d be fitting if they did. You know, in keeping with the “stupid” theme they have going now.

Windows 8 will restrict desktop customization?

That’s the inside skinny from PC Gamer, at least:

One of the very few choices we have left in this world is the ability to put a picture of family, friends or favourite frags on our desktop backgrounds, but even that facsimile of free will is being withdrawn. According to an interview over at our sister site TechRadar, customisation of Windows 8′s new Metro interface will be limited to decisions about the solid colour background.

The reason given is that a photograph wouldn’t scale and slide as the icons shift beneath your fingertips — although as the owner of an Android tablet I’m pretty happy with the way Google’s got around this issue. Android simply makes the desktop smaller than the image, so that it moves in the background as you scroll.

Thanks to iOS, though, desktop customisation is going out of fashion fast and it’s not surprising that Metro introduces more limits. Even Linux is becoming more proscriptive by the day.

It’s worth noting that iOS still allows you to use a bloody background image!

This is a conundrum: I am actually a really big fan of the Metro UI concept, but it’s still nice to have customization options available in case I feel like messing around. I’m big on workspace personalization, and that applies as much to my virtual workspaces as my actual one.

Tonight’s post brought to you by the planet Earth:

Blue Marble HD!

It’s been a while since we’ve had one of these, and my inbox is getting full of emails-to-self containing links to interesting stories. As such…open thread!

Need a little more wi-fi range? Have a beer!”

And then follow the directions at the link above to turn the can into a surprisingly effective DIY parabolic reflector.

The Good News: Syndicate is coming back!

The bad news: Starbreeze has reincarneted the franchise as a first-person shooter. Bah!

Is the PC re-emerging as a gaming platform?

A better question might be whether or not the PC ever vanished or died out as a gaming platform. But if the word of a World of Warcraft developer means anything to any of you, it is his opinion that the PC is coming back into its own from a gaming perspective.

This is the Blizzard, though, that makes a point of sidestepping being labeled a “PC developer”, however.

Do you feel that people try to take advantage of you?

It should surprise nobody that Canadians and Americans tend to be fairly trusting people who expect that others have the best of intentions:

The interesting result, I think, is India. It would seem that just under 2/3rds of the Indian population tend to be highly distrustful of others, while the remaining third tend to be highly trusting of same. There is basically no middle ground to be found; Indians (it seems) will either completely trust you, or completely distrust you, and that’s that.

Kind of cool: A web-based iPad 2 simulator.

Skyrim developers will keep the “fun bugs” in the game.

“We try to solve most of it, we’re sensitive to a lot of it,” said producer Todd Howard. “There is a subset of that where we say ‘Well, that’s what can happen.’ If there’s entertainment value in that, whatever it is, we’ll leave a lot of it. If it’s gonna break the game, or unbalance the game in some way, we do try to solve it.

“If the solution is gonna make the game less fun … well, hey, leave it in. It’s their game.”

This is hardly a precedent, of course — one thinks of the weird graphical effects of eating mushrooms in Ultima Underworld, which was actually a glitch that the programmers opted to deliberately trigger in a special in-game case — but it’s rather heartening to hear, I think.

Do read the whole article; Howard also comments on MMORPGs and how Bethesda knows when big “is big enough” for a game.

I don’t know how many of you are Unity3D developers…

…but I’ve been toying around with that particular middleware for the last month or two, and I found this feature piece from Gamasutra to be a fairly interesting read.

You can play as a vampire in Skyrim!

The catch is that you need to catch the vampirism malady first, however.

A handful of Mass Effect 3 screenshots from PAX.

The game looks great, and I am honestly impressed with how well BioWare has been keeping a lid on details. It’s a bizarre thing about me, but I’m actually impressed that I’m starting to lose just a bit of interest in the game. Oh, not a lot; I still very much want it to come out, very much want to play it, and very much want to play it again after that. But, well…I’m a spoiler junkie; I love leaked details, and I tend to find that those are what thrill me the most during the run-up to a game or movie release.

And…well…there just haven’t been that many leaks where ME3 is concerned. None, really, that I can think of, apart from what few details BioWare has handed out. Kudos to them for that, even if I am disappointed by it.

Skyrim looks awesome, of course.

No, as in: really, really awesome.

Okay, here…twenty-odd minutes of Skyrim action. Are you happy now?

Tonight’s post brought to you by what if?:

I am looking forward to this game — which, I can’t point out enough, has as its lead designer Ian “Tiberius Moongazer” Fraizer, who lead the Lazarus project team — more than ever after reading a couple of different articles over the weekend.

The first is a Gamasutra feature, The ‘Long And Crazy Tale’ Of Kingdoms Of Amalur’s Creation. It’s an interview with Tibby, actually, and it covers the history of the game from its inception at Big Huge Games (under the working title Crucible), through the days when THQ owned Big Huge Games, and up to today, where the game is being produced by 38 Studios (an independent company founded by former baseball star Curt Schilling).

This part of the article may appeal to Ultima fans:

Playing a key role in guiding the team through its challenges is RPG veteran Ken Rolston, lead designer on Bethesda Softworks’ The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. He has an office at Big Huge and plays Reckoning regularly, giving feedback to the team.

“He’s not like writing dialogue as a general rule, he’s more playing quests and looking for what doesn’t work, seeing how we can we make this more ‘open,’ what we can do to support the freeform play style,” Frazier explained. “As an example, recently we have a lot of quests in the game — we had over a hundred side quests between faction lines and stuff, and generally we expect that’s what people are going to do. But Ken played the game for, I think it was three or four days straight without a single save, and didn’t do any quests. He was deliberately avoiding quests.”

“He was just wandering around, killing things and crafting stuff, and that’s it,” said Frazier. “He was going out of his way to not do any quest content, just to see what that would feel like, and how quickly he would advance, and what the XP looked like for a character that doesn’t do quests and so on. Then he just gives me a dump truck of feedback on that experience and then we can tune things to make that a good experience.”

“Ken’s office is actually across the hall from mine, which is good because we have squirt guns that we’ll attack each other with from time to time.”

Open world? Freeform play style? You read that right, and Tibby confirms those details in this Q&A session at the Reckoning forums:

Reckoning’s structure is extremely open. The main quest and each of the six factions contains a mostly-linear narrative you can follow, but you can veer off and pursue hundreds of different sidequests at any time. Even if you choose to ignore all the quests completely, the world is ripe for exploration, with all manner of rewards to find (both hand crafted and systemic) for the explorer.

The game is being marketed almost like a God of War clone, which is kind of unfortunate; it may well incorporate lots of action elements and combat, but it obviously also goes a lot deeper than that, into the territory that we have come to expect from an RPG. But then, with Tibby leading the design of the project…is that really a surprise?

Why mods are ace.

Over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, there’s a video posted in which it is explained in detail why PC gamers should be given the option to alter their games, and why modding makes everything better.

In addition to being non-moddable, Diablo 3 will feature an in-game, player-to-player auction house where players can trade items for in-game gold…or real money.

Just when I thought I couldn’t despise Activision-Blizzard any more than I already do, they come up with something like this:

Diablo 3 will sport a couple of in-game auction houses to sell items from player to player. One will be run entirely with in-game gold (very similar to the current WoW Auction House), and one will let players sell and buy items with actual money.

…Yes, Diablo 3 players will be able to spend real money on in-game items, but rather than a traditional item store, Blizzard plans to create a system wherein players sell items to each other — the eBay of Sanctuary, if you will. Players will be able to put items up for sale in each of the game’s various regions around the world (with a different real-world currency for each), and other players will be able to spend real money to buy them, with the real-world money going back to the original item owners.

Blizzard will take fixed fees (as yet unrevealed, though they’ll be “nominal”) out of the sale price both when an auction goes up for sale and when it is actually sold. And when an item is sold, players will either be able to keep earned money in a Battle.net account for spending on Blizzard products and services, or cash out entirely, with another, percentage-based fee through a not-yet-announced third-party payment provider.

Sales of items in MMORPGs and other online games have been going on since the days of Ultima Online, so it’s not as though Blizzard is offering anything new and novel here (they never offer anything new and novel anyway). Instead, they are simply moving something which other MMORPGs frown upon and/or forbid in their Terms of Service inside the game.

Why? Blizzard’s “on paper” reasoning is that moving the transactions into Diablo 3 instead of allowing them to happen on third-party sites will increase the security of the process for players. Personally, I think it has more to do with the fact that they charge three “nominal” fees per item sold. Methinks Bobby Kotick has decided that it’s not enough to have pillows stuffed with Benjamins; he wants a money-stuffed duvet as well.

More details: here, here, and here!

Bonus: Diablo 3 features always-online DRM; you can’t play it without an Internet connection.

All that said, it does look like a sweet game.

I mentioned Hard Reset previously…

…and the first gameplay trailer for it has arrived since then.

Just for reference, this is the game being built (in Poland, I think) by newly-formed studio Flying Wild Hog (which, in turn, is comprised of industry veterans who worked on such games as Bulletstorm, Sniper, and The Witcher 2).

Speaking of Bulletstorm…

…Ars Technica presents a handy guide on how to ruin the PC port of your game in five quick steps!

Windows XP finally loses its majority share amongst Internet users!

This is the happiest day on the Internet. I declare it to be so!

Interview with David Gaider: The Writing of Dragon Age 2

Gamasutra examines the writing process that went in to BioWare’s Dragon Age 2 and looks at how its team wanted to focus on telling a darker, edgier story. Which, frankly, is a trend in fantasy writing that I (for one) think needs to be curbed right now.

Did Metal Gear Solid 2 predict Facebook?

Well…sort of.

Tired of hearing me ramble on about Free-to-Play?

Epic Games president Mike Capps doesn’t think it’s all that, and doesn’t expect the F2P model will become an industry standard any time soon.

Win a chance to playtest Battlefield 3 in Sweden!

Sorry I don’t seem able to shut up about this game.

Earth has a “Trojan asteroid”!

Nothing to do with Spartans or sex, though; a trojan (in this context) is an asteroid that shares an orbit with a planet, at a stable point either in front or behind said planet. A few planets in the Solar System are known to have trojans, and now it appears that Earth does as well.

Yes, your smartphone can take incredible photos…if you know how to use it.

It’s true (to a large degree, at any rate) that a professional with a crappy camera can usually take a better picture than a n00b with the most awesome camera and lens on the market. A lot of that comes down to just knowing the finer points of composition and how to control the shot and the subject(s).

Equally, though: the pro who is handed a crappy camera can spend a few minutes messing around with said camera and probably figure out what settings to enable (or disable) in order to get the best image possible. The n00b with the awesome camera, by comparison, probably has no clue what half the damn buttons and dials do in the first place, and wouldn’t know the first thing about e.g. why changing the aperture setting can make the difference between a moderately-sharp image and a razor-sharp image.

Don’t be the n00b; learn how to use your camera! Learn what its strengths and weaknesses are, learn what you can do to eke a bit of extra performance out of it. Even your smartphone can take a striking image if you know a thing or two about its tiny little camera.

Tonight’s post brought to you by stabbing yourself“planking”:

You would think this sort of thing would be obvious! Spiky fence...pointy ends...no? No? Anyone?

Bonus:

I guess this is an improvement?

Gamasutra has posted a lengthy interview with Ultima creator Richard Garriott, in which he discusses his plans to bring an “Ultima Online-like experience” to the social gaming scene, and how he wants that experience to be accessible to just about everyone.

“Even the kinds of games that you might think I would make, I don’t generally play, because they’re often just too much of a hassle to get into them,” says Garriott, of the current crop of MMOs.

Instead, he says, he spends his gaming time with the iPhone, and believes that the true evolution of games will be one that allows mainstream gamers to touch the depth of design that he and his compatriots are capable of.

So we can take this as confirmation of at least one thing; New Britannia, whatever it finally ends up looking like, will indeed be a multiplayer game, in the MMORPG mold, but easier to get into and (presumably) taking full advantage of the social features of its target platforms: Facebook, hi5, Twitter, and suchlike.

He also talks up the Portalarium concept a bit, in a way that I had not previously heard:

Now if you’re playing one Ville-like game and I’m playing a different Ville-like game, we don’t know about each other’s activities during those games until after I log out and look at my posts on my wall and I go, “Oh, at the same that I was playing, my friend was playing this other game; kind of wish I knew that.”

And so we’ve created an infrastructure — a standardized messaging system between all games — so that while you’re playing a game, I can get notifications of what you’ve done that I can either ignore, tell you congratulations or whatever else, or click on a link that lets me change games and jump right in and play right alongside you. So we believe that we’re trying to deepen the connections between you and your friends across all the games that you play.

This almost sounds like the way Valve’s Steam does things; I might fire up Torchlight or Mass Effect, and in behind these games the Steam framework fires up and hums quietly along. Periodically, in the lower right corner of the screen, I’ll see a notification pop up, informing me that one of my Steam contacts has begun playing Trine (or whatever; this is just an example).

It also goes way beyond what Steam offers; I can’t just click on the notification and suddenly play Trine alongside my contact. But things are a bit different with browser games, which don’t require large installs to get started in.

Garriott elaborates:

[O]ne of my personal goals is to create a more what I call an Ultima Online-like experience with the game that I’m hoping to do — the big game coming up. And that will again go back to making linear narrative somewhat of a challenge, just like it was a challenge in Ultima Online.

…[I]magine two games, one of which is Ultima Online the way it was shipped. You go to the store and pay 50 bucks for it — well first of all you have to drive to the store, pay 50 dollars, bring it home, install it, then you have to sign up to pay 10 dollars a month, and then you can play it.

Or here’s version 2: same exact game, but your friend sent you an email, click on this link and you can play. You click on it, you begin playing immediately, it’s streaming download — you don’t have to do the huge install to begin with, and only if you play past level 5 do I then find a way to charge you for it — for hopefully about the same amount of money.

Which of those games are you going to enjoy the most? Presumably, you’re going to enjoy them the same — because it’s the same game — but which one do you think is going to spread more easily? Well, clearly the one that you can just click on an email and play is going to spread more easily.

So that’s what I’m saying — don’t worry about the content of what you see so far. Think of it as a distribution method and a platform of access. The reason why I play so many games on this platform is because it’s so easy, and two to five bucks is an impulse purchase. I don’t even think of a price that I’m paying to play these games, even though in total, in a month, I pay a lot more for iPhone games than I ever did in PC games because I just buy a lot more of them. And so that’s fine.

I’ve talked up the potential that even a rube like me can see in the social gaming space before, and a lot of people have come back with the reply that, in effect, the current crop of social games (Zynga’s various offerings, Lord of Ultima, etc.) has more or less left them convinced that the scene is just a passing fad full of trite, unappealingly simple distractions. And I have in the past tried to express the potential of social gaming by using the metaphor of mobile phone games, which have become amazingly complex and graphically stunning despite their humble and overly simplstic beginnings.

Garriott comes right out and says it directly: “don’t worry about the content of what you see so far”, because that’s a distraction. Look at the power and ubiquity of the platform being used to deliver that content, instead. It’s just waiting — maybe begging — for a developer to come along and use it to its full potential, and to bring a hell of a great game to the social space which does just that.

More importantly, he goes on to discuss the advantage for developers, who — in coding these games and administering them as they run — will have access to all kinds of player information and metrics.

[N]o MMO developer should be excused from not knowing the answers to these questions because we had metrics then, too.

…[I]n Ultima Online we constantly used those metrics to redesign the game. For example, one of my favorite stories is, in Ultima Online, when the game shipped, you could use a fishing pole on the water and there was a 50/50 chance you’d get a fish. Beginning and end of simulation — literately use a pole, on water, 50/50, fish. Lots of people did it, tons of people did it.

And people began to believe apocryphal information about fishing; they began to believe that if you fished in a river versus in the ocean they were better chances of getting fish, which of course was not true. I told you the simulation use fishing pole, on water, 50/50, fish. That’s it!

But so many people were doing it, and so many people had these fictitious beliefs that we thought, “Wow, we should spend some time to make fishing better!” And we did. Over time we actually made the fishing simulation more improved, gave you different kinds of fish, and there really was a point to using different places, and then it became even more popular.

And there were things that we thought were really cool that we put in the game, that nobody noticed or cared about — very sad and tragic. But we either fixed and adressed those, or often, we just removed them from the game.

This level of information could be gathered back in the 1990s. Today, even developers of single-player titles run all kinds of analytics utilities in the background as players play, and will tweak game balance mechanics, enemy and power-up placements, and other details of the game in patches and updates based on the information they collect. All of this goes toward making the games incrementally better for players as they play through them.

Just imagine how possible that would be in a social game, especially given the amount of information people will reveal about themselves and their tastes on some social networks (e.g. Facebook). For a developer who wants to make games which promote emergent gameplay and respond to the unique tastes of players, that’s a gold mine!

So…what’s next for Garriott and Portalarium? If you’ve been following the news, or even just following Aiera, you already know:

We’re just about to release our first truly original game, which is still a very light game in a sense of social media type game, but not a farming game, not a cafÈ operation game, not a pet management game, but a truly original game; it’s still quite light by what people might expect from Lord British standards.

That game is called Ultimate Collector. And then we’re going to roll into what I call the next, you know, big Lord British virtual world game (Lord Britishís New Britannia).

Ultimate Collector, set in a contemporary world/theme, will be out sometime this summer and is a unique social media style game which will have some of the same conventions (asynchronous play, sharing accomplishments and information with your friends, etc.) that are part of successful social media games today.

I will soon begin development of my new Lord British-style RPG for social media and mobile platforms in the very near future. Lord British’s New Britannia, which was mentioned in our SXSW Accelerator presentation in March, is a working title for that product.

As I said, you all should have known this already. From the sound of it, we’ll all be able to play New Britannia on our iPads and iPhones, too; Garriott remarks that they are working on versions of the Portalarium player for both devices, and one can only assume that the list of target platforms extends beyond iOS devices as well.

Another great find arriving via Twitter is this interview with Rich Vogel, a former Ultima Online associate producer who is now the VP of Product Development for BioWare Austin. It’s a lengthy interview, and I don’t think I could do it justice in excerpting it, so let me instead relate the one piece of it that really struck me:

When did you realize [PK/griefing] was starting to go out of control?

RV: It took about three months until we realized that we had a lot of systems in place that needed to be checked. About four or five months after launch we actually had gangs going around ñ literally had real gangs in the game going around causing trouble.

We had servers near the Northeast, which were bad servers and then we had servers in the Midwest, which were very calm and nice. It’s interesting how they all felt different. In the Midwest we had role players, right, and they loved it, they really took to it and were very proud of their servers.

In the Northeast we had the gangs and in the Pacific we had the gangs. Just unbelievable trouble on both the east and west coasts and it’s just literally how they all developed. The Pacific was one of our worst. It was kind of like the broken window syndrome. You just had a whole bunch of bad people in one area and it just grew.

I find it utterly fascinating how griefing and player-killing in Ultima Online were, in the main, regional problems. There is an immense and largely unexplored wealth of gamer psychology and demographic information contained in that simple observation, and I find myself wondering if it is a phenomenon that has carried over — in various forms — to other MMORPGs?

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