I sometimes (often) disagree with Koster about game design, but he’s dead on with everything here. He’s got a lot of great soundbites, too. (I especially like his bit about fake news as instanced dungeons.) It’s amazing how much the games industry reinvents the wheel, because people with experience get forced out (by poor working conditions, etc.) and people who remain don’t do their homework. Even the big game companies with smart people who get paid the (relatively) big bucks end up making rookie mistakes that a bit of research would have avoided. And this is true for multi-player games, communities around that, content creation systems, etc. When Valve, for example, added their user-submitted content system to Steam - Greenlight - it was as if no one there had looked at anything similar for obvious pitfalls. So they fell into a lot of pits, and they’re going to go through it all again as they’re replacing that system with another, poorly conceived one. (To their credit, the actual multiplayer games they make seem to have things figured out a lot more, the betting sites that sprung up around them aside.) And don’t get me started on all the multiplayer games that came out of the app gold rush. So many seemed to be deliberately encouraging the creation of the most dysfunctional communities possible.
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