Skeckulous

I'll be looking at Set, Werewolf, Casablanca, Club Penguin, and Toontown for themes and mechanics and how the two affect the game.

Set is fairly simplistic and has no real specific theme. The only theme I could glean from it would be that of a Mensa game, as it seems to be a selling point for the game. This is an interesting category of game types that are made to show one's intelligence (though I am sure some would debate me as to if this is a theme at all). Interestingly this theme fits well for the game as it stresses being able to calculate things quickly.

Werewolf, unlike Set, is quite clear in it's theming. The theme fits into the classic horror genre and has a lot of history behind it, because of this many of the mechanics are self explanatory and require less work to teach a new player. The mechanics of lynching and killing work well with the theme of the werewolf as it has been reiterated in many a film and story for years.

Casablanca has the primary mechanics revolve around finding the identity of other players and trying to destroy them or ruin their credibility. This fits well with the theming of a fascist state where the government is trying to sniff out rebels. Again theming fits mechanics.

Club Penguin has various random games that could have any general theme on them. The penguin them works well enough because it is cute and kids end up enjoying it but I would say that overall most any theme could be put on any of these simple flash games.
This theming works but doesn't really need to be penguins.

Toontown has similar gaming to most MMOs but is themed with a cartoon world similar to that of Roger Rabbit. This could be any theme as well for the mechanics involved, as we have seen through various MMOs with similar mechanics, but this theme also helps on another side which is player relationships and friendliness. This theme helps change the more violent activities to humorous and thus enables a different environment which encourages joking and more friendly relationships.

Posted by Scott Gillies at 2:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Club Penguin has been big in the news lately with Disney purchasing them for a hefty sum. So lets take a look.

It is primarily a over glorified mini-game selector with a small addition of a confusing chat room. The mini-games are fairly simple and lead you to acquiring gold which eventually becomes a grind. After some time you can buy interesting toys and show them off to others. During all of this there are sections where you can chat with other members and it appears as a bubble over your head.

There are various things that I would change for Club Penguin. The chat is confusing, as there is so much going on in one area that it becomes hard to parse who is saying what. The interaction areas are not well defined (you can walk your penguin around an area and trigger a game accidentally because there is no clearly defined trigger area). The way the interface is designed, you can barely get across simple ideas with the amount of space you are allowed to type.

The avatars are so similar looking that it becomes hard to distinguish between people. That coupled with the problem that each area is extremely crowded and each avatar can take up the same space so you end up with overlapping penguins.

I can see how this appeals to kids showing off their toys to other friends but feel that it is a fairly shallow experience.

Posted by Scott Gillies at 2:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This summer I decided to try my hand at a student run casual MMO Casablanca (http://itp.nyu.edu/itp/object/itp_news_mtvU.html - http://itp.nyu.edu/itp/object/itp_news_mtvU.html). The other game I gave a try at was Toontown by Disney. Two very different games in many aspects from scale to purpose.

The gameplay of Casablanca revolves around the interaction of the Occupation versus the Resistance. The Occupation is trying to infiltrate as many of the Resistance Networks while the Resistance tries to make as large of a network as possible. It was purported to be a mobile game but it looked to just be a chat client that would txt you.

Upon first glance, it appeared that there would be a great deal of interaction between all players,where each player would be trying to discover each person's identity. From my experience it became a very slow chat room in which I would wait for the website to update. I was confused as to how one was supposed to play. With a constant chat room you could finish this game in an hour or two but with this web based client it was much slower. This made the flow of the game become tedious as once I signed off the website there was very little reason for me to log back in. It would take far too long to communicate with others and to coordinate attacks. If it was more strictly scheduled so you only had a few moves a day or hours then I would know to come back and continue my progress.

This break in the gameplay made it hard for me to want to communicate with others. In the first few hours of gameplay I tried to message specific people and talk in the primary chat rooms but the response times were so long that it became a chore to check up on and there was little reward for this. It made me wonder what types of restrictions you would want to put on a game that primarily focuses on player communication (time, length of speech, choice of words, etc.)

Toontown was a much more focused experience (to be fair Casablanca is still in Beta and wasn't made by a gigantic company). In the beginning your very words are controlled and you are given a list of various emotes to communicate with others. This is one of the most interesting parts of Toontown as they have narrowed down all communication to the basics of what an MMO player would want/need.

You are encouraged, early on, to join groups with others but also hampered by the control of how you can communicate with them (unless you add each other as friends). This makes for a limited amount of things you can convey. The interface is fairly robust and has a great deal of things that you might wish to communicate to a team member. It trivializes the communication between players and also introduces the question of how one makes friends in an MMO. Usually you party with someone enough times and if they do their job well then you might consider them a friend. The more arduous tasks you go through with that person, the closer you grow to them but all in all you are just running through a maze killing little beasts.

Both of these games made me wonder what constitutes an online relationship and what brings players together online. What levels of online relationships are there and how do they correspond with various ingame and out of game actions.

Posted by Scott Gillies at 3:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)