Tag: Clan Lord
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What keeps people engaged?
If you study MMOs at all, you may have seen Tom Chatfield’s TED Talk in which he talks about what game designers have learned about what keeps people engaged in a game. He identifies the following: problem solving –> ambition + delight progress bars multiple long and short-term aims reward effort, don’t punish failure much…
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Writing in Character
For awhile I was writing here, and on my abstract, and I was not writing so much as my character. Eventually I started to feel a kind of pressure as that blog fell further behind my in character life. I started to feel that I wanted to write about what was happening to me in…
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Research Update… If only I could get paid to play. 😉
So I’ve been collecting responses to questions about Clan Lord and trying to weave them together. The process is interesting because I represent myself with two voices. So far, the players participating have been speaking as mainly players, not characters, but because most prefer to use only their character names, and because CL players pepper…
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Attempting a New Approach to Fan and Game Studies
So… as I posted last time, I will be speaking about how one might take an approach to studying an MMO fan community that achieves not just a balance between the critical stance of a scholar and the enthusiasm of a player, but some kind of integration of the two positions. Further, how might the…
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Inhabiting Characters
One of the most striking aspects of this particular game is the extent to which players are devoted to their characters. The explanations for this devotion include some that fairly straightforward and common to many games: simple time investment; in some cases as long as 12 years effort; time and energy may have been spent…
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When Players become the Story
Clan Lord differs from other MMOs in many ways; one of the most basic is longevity. The game has been running since it was released in 1999 And there are a number of players who have participated since the beginning. This longevity suggests that there must be some unique features, and there are — but…
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Designing Cooperation
I said I’d have more to say… So here are some ways Clan Lord pretty well forces people to cooperate: The display is looking down from above, rather than heads up, and you can’t “run through” other players and most objects, so coordinating movement during a fight or hunt becomes a priority and requires agreement.…