ZenAndGames.com

The guys from Penny Arcade aren’t around this week and are having guests write their articles for them. Tycho from Penny Arcade ran into Raph Koster and posed a design challenge to him to come up with a MMO based around players building buildings, actually getting in there doing the wiring, plumbing the whole lot.

One thing Raph said that I really think is an important way of looking at games is this.

Games are made out of smaller games – turtles all the way down, until you hit the game that is so trivial and stupid it isn’t deserving of the name. In an MMO, we nest games pretty deep, because some games are short-term and some are long-term. In something like WoW, the smallest games are things like “hit Heal on time.” Then you get ‘kill the foozle,” and above that “kill a hell of a lot of foozles” and above that “make yourself stronger by picking the right gear” and in some cases “make your guild stronger” and so on.

I think that is a very insightful way of looking at how to design games, as mini games within themselves. The whole article is worth a read because the MMO he comes up with does sound like it could be kinda fun even. He came up with it in only 3 hours too.

I think the idea of doing mini designs and then showing them off is kind of cool, maybe I’ll do those occasionally here. Through up rough sketches of game ideas for anyone to read and pick apart that may be fun

Also Raph is working on a new project called Metaplace which looks to be very interesting. It promises to enable the players to design and create their own MMOs.