PUBLIC MARKS from bcpbcp with tags www.raphkoster.com & games

The entire video game industry’s history thus far has been an aberration. It has been a mutant monster only made possible by unconnected computers. People always play games together. All of you learned to play games with each other. When you were kids, you played tag, tea parties, cops and robbers, what have you. The single-player game is a strange mutant monster which has only existed for 21 years and is about to go away because it is unnatural and abnormal.

Dan Arey gave a talk at GDC 2005 on developing AAA games, and interviewed several designers for it. The actual interview was quite long, and I skipped many of the questions... but here's the answers to the ones that I did respond to. You can comment here on the blog if you like.

OGLE: The OpenGLExtractor is a tool that lets you grab 3d data out of an OpenGL application and output it as models again.

As with many of the Asian games, there’s a nominally massively multiplayer lobby, which you enter minimally multiplayer games from. You play the game in order to earn virtual cash, plus you buy a different sort of virtual cash. You can then buy further accessories for your character (clothes, character customization, etc) and new stuff to play (in this case, songs) with that money.

This talk was given as part of an IBM Games on Demand webcast conference. “We should remember that 90% of the online game players out there are playing a game that was not developed by a professional: they’re playing CounterStrike, which was user-created.”

"Once upon a time there was a world where half of the population couldn’t see the color blue."