Jonathan Zabel

MSN Games:

How is community being dealt with?

• There are community forums where people can ask tech questions, give their suggestions on the site and, most importantly, share their game stories with other players.
  
• A newsletter that advertises new games, events, and opportunities to win prizes.
  
• Ability to play certain games with other players online, such as Texas Hold 'Em.

Encouraging or discouraging social interaction?

• The newsletters, forums and multiplayer online play are all encouraging elements.
  
• The fact that certain games have to be downloaded to your hard drive and played single-player both takes people away from the MSN Games social portal and also ensures that they are not interacting with the community.

Yahoo Games

How is the community being dealt with?

• The formation of gaming leagues, the ability to create a personal profile and a newsletter which interested players can sign up for.

Encouraging or discouraging social interaction?

• Yahoo has the same problem as MSN Games: many of the games it features take you away from the portal. Some even take you to different communities entirely... I'm specifically referring to GameTap here.

  Posted by Jonathan Zabel at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Blog Assignment #1

Set: The atmosphere in room was somber, intensely focused, and competitive. Sure, there was some laughing, but not nearly as much as the other games.

Boggle: Boggle was a little better than Set in terms of encouraging laughter and camaraderie, but it still felt like mainly a solo activity. When the timer was running, the conversation died down to nothing but a few pithy comments. The crossing off of words at the end was also pretty mechanical.

Scattergories: Scattergories still felt non-interactive when the timer was running and people were thinking of words, but when we were comparing words at the end it started becoming more multiplayer and interactive. Some of the words provoked laughter and were telling of the personalities of the people who wrote them, but the process still felt a bit mechanical.

Cranium: Cranium was very distinctive from the get-go in its multiplayer aspects. All of the tasks (save for perhaps trivia) were telling of the personalities and skills of the people playing: modeling things, drawing things, acting out. All of these activities not only were fun to watch a prompted peals of laughter, but they also allowed me to get to know the people I was playing with a little better.

Kingdom of Loathing: Kingdom of Loathing is an MMORPG, but the mechanics felt solely geared towards a single player experience. The aesthetics, with the primitive “notepad doodle” art style and the tounge-in-cheek writing really served to distance me from the actual action of the game, and I grew bored very quickly.

Sissy Fight: Though not really an MMORPG, Sissyfight is a multiplayer game that I was immediately able to immerse myself into thanks to the simplistic mechanics. I also found the dramatic elements (a schoolyard catfight) to be huge detractor from my engagement, but I was able to play for a while. I did feel like I was interacting with the other players to a much greater extent than with Kingdom of Loathing.

Posted by Jonathan Zabel at 1:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)