An interview with two MMO luminaries
Over on the F13.net site, they have up a great, lengthy interview with David Rickey (former world builder for Dark Age of Camelot, among other things) and Scott Jennings. This literate, insightful discussion between the two noted designers and F13's yoru touches on a number of topics that are almost guaranteed to interest you. There's also Mongolian Barbecue, if you like that sort of thing.
Specific subjects include:
How they got into the industry.
Their own personal game-making heroes.
Taking game design seriously.
The role of games.
The MMO target audience.
The work process.
The maturation of the MMO audience.
My favorite excerpt from the conversation probably stems from that last point, and springs from the mouth of Dave: You look at the movies from the thirties and forties, when they were just finally figuring out how to really make good movies. But you didn't have a lot of complexity - you had good guys, you had bad guys, you generally could always tell who was who. It wasn't until the fifties, and especially the sixties, that you started to see conflicted heroes, anti-heroes, the bad guy who reaches redemption in the last act. All of this kind of narrative depth didn't occur until both the medium and the audience had matured beyond the simplistic.
