Necessary Complexity in Virtual Gaming and Games Within Games

Posted by Nelson Williams | January 4, 2009

The good folks over at Massively.com are running a great article about necessary complexity in games, using the failure of Google’s Lively MMO as an example. Short order, games that are too complex might offer players a wealth of options and free cookies, but no one’s going to run that kind of rat maze when they could be playing World of Warcraft. A game that’s too simple, like Lively, risks boring players out of their skulls with a lack of options and sending them back to playing World of Warcraft. Or, to use the jargon of the day, boring games suck. You can read the article here.

Now, I’ve been a part of the pen-and-paper gaming world for aeons long past remembering, and our shrouded guild of fiends and ghouls has been wrestling with the same problem. Why is the most popular role-playing game in …

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Google’s Lively Isn’t.

Posted by Nelson Williams | November 21, 2008

Out around July, the search engine giant and our future overlord Google launched a virtual world project called Lively. Another one of Google’s experiments, Lively was meant as a sort of MMO playground that would expand along a common standard to create a massive virtual space across the countries of the world. However, the game, if you could call it that, was hamstrung by a family-friendly approach that limited its appeal against the (very much more) relaxed Second Life MMO. Also, user reports had the client as a rather bloated, slow, and inconsistent beast that failed to perform on even the beefiest computers.

Yesterday, Google announced they were shutting down Lively in December and clearing out the dev team to hurl them back into the Search Mines of Googlestania. No particular reason for axing the service was given, except that it didn’t pay off suitably to survive. …

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