Paying to Own, Paying to Compete: Monetizing the Social Game

So, yeah, I've been playing a fair amount of CivWorld on Facebook for the past few weeks. I have done so in preperation for a podcast that we recorded last weekend on Civworld, casual gaming, and the hardcore player.

In addition, I have helped manage my wife's city in Cityville since some time around the beginning of the summer.

Seeing the differences between the social game oriented towards the casual player and the one (ostensibly) oriented towards the more hardcore crowd has me thinking about the problems of doing well with a social game in the CivWorld vein. It's harder to monetize.

Here's maybe why:

Paying to Own, Paying to Compete: Monetizing the Social Game

Moving Pixels Podcast: The Role of Cheating in Video Games

Ah, the Konami code.

I've always hated god mode. It's boring.

I also really don't love using gamefaqs. They make me feel... less accomplished.

That isn't quite what we talk about during this 'cast, as Rick's framing of the discussion makes cheating more of a moral question. But that's okay because I like such frames in any case.

Moving Pixels Podcast: The Role of Cheating in Video Games

Tropico 4: In Politics (and Video Games), the Game Never Changes

A podcast should be posted up at PopMatters a little later on today. The topic will be cheating.

In the meanwhile, I reviewed Tropico 4 for the site and largely found myself writing about the problem with assigning numerical scores to games, as a result of trying to review this new Tropico correctly. Basically, the quandry for me is that this is a very good game, but it is also the same game that I played last year.

Is that good? Is that bad? What number represents "very, very good but..."?

Here's my unresolved thoughts on the matter:

Tropico 4: In Politics (and Video Games), the Game Never Changes

Could You Carry Our Stuff? Oh, and Maybe the Plot, Too, While You're at It

So, I've spent the last week and a half or so with Dead Island (among a few other odds and ends). I think the gameplay is quite good, the game lags a bit in the middle (and also seems much more suited to multiplayer than my own single player tendencies at that point in play), and it has a serviceable plot.

What I got interested in this week was the charcter Jin, who is not one of the playable characters, but instead, an NPC that doubles as a storage container for the PCs.

Strangely much of the plot's burden is left to this mobile storage device rather than to the ostensible protagonists, so I talk a bit about the perspective that that gives one on the game's story.

Could You Carry Our Stuff? Oh, and Maybe the Plot, Too, While You're at It

The Moving Pixels Podcast Is Being Difficult

A common enough difference between game players is how much difficulty that they're willing to stand.

Within my Saturday night board gaming group, there are any number of answers. Some of our players want a game to be as complex to master as possible. Some want a system that evokes more mood than challenge.

Such levels of difficulty very much affect our attitudes towards a game. Wih difficulty often improving a game's pleasure for some of us, while possibly just as often it serves as a hinderance to fun for others.

So, this week the Moving Pixels Podcast considers how difficulty contributes to the pleasure and pain of video gaming:

The Moving Pixels Podcast Is Being Difficult

Parenting with Angry Birds

Nothing heavy today.

Casual thoughts on a casual game:

Parenting with Angry Birds

Moving Pixels Podcast: Art, Commerce, and the Auteur in Video Games

So, a brief hiatus for the Moving Pixels podcast due to Labor Day last week.

In our return this week, we are joined by podcasting vet Scott Juster of ExperiencePoints.net for a discussion of whether the auteur theory is a useful concept to apply to video games, which gets us launched into discussing issues of marketing and commerce within the medium.

Moving Pixels Podcast: Art, Commerce, and the Auteur in Video Games

In Some Games, It's the Pattern, Not the Plot, That Makes Them Beautiful

I kind of see this as a companion piece to my essay on "Why Video Games Might Not Be Art" column from a few weeks ago, though that may make little sense to anyone but me.

When I wrote "Why Video Games Might Not Be Art," it was in an effort to address a few issues that have bothered me when it comes to how folks talk about video games and art and how I feel like most of the smart talk about games has avoided distinguishing between aestehtic categories. Not that I think that that talk isn't smart or relevant, I do, just that few people seem equipped or willing to confront aesthetics themselves, focusing on other lines of critique when it comes to games, social, political, rhetorical, etc.

In any case, this post is an effort to address something that I keep hearing from game critics that seems to suggest that narrative and art are somehow intertwined, as if beauty is not accessible without a story. I would agree that story is one of the clearest access points to the beautiful. It is a great "vehicle" for art. However, I don't think that it is requisite to call something art.

In Some Games, It's the Pattern, Not the Plot, That Makes Them Beautiful

Review: Frantic Frigates

Must. Stop. Writing.

More flash reviews. More Writing.

More. More. More.

Need less.

Review: Frantic Frigates