Gamasutra -- Massively Multiplayer Online Games Resource Guide 2004


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Resource Guide Sponsor:

IT GlobalSecure has delivered security and engineering services since 2000. Its network game middleware, SecurePlay, simplifies multi-player game development and prevents many forms of cheating. SecurePlay Casual is available for building online versions of board games, card games, and puzzles, while SecurePlay Professional adds additional features for action, sports, role-playing, and other advanced computer games. Both products support multiple languages, platforms and networks including consoles, handhelds, PCs, wireless and Internet.

White Papers:

Cheating and Your Bottom Line discusses the impact of cheating for all forms of games and how even games with a free online component are hurt by cheating problems.

Why Protocol-based Security Trumps Software Security discusses the power of security protocols and how they can be applied to game security problems.

Towards a Third-Generation Game Architecture introduces the concept of a distributed transaction architecture to fundamentally improve performance and improve security for network games.

Building Games with SecurePlay briefly introduces the SecurePlay API and shows how easily developers can build multi-platform, multi-network, multi-language, multi-player games.

Monday, September 20:

Lessons Learned in the Virtual World by Don Carson
Don Carson, the former art director at There Inc., and previously a theme park designer for Walt Disney Imagineering, shares some of the insights, delights, and pitfalls he discovered in four years of directing an art team, tasked with building an ambitious virtual world from scratch.

Tuesday, September 21:

Unmasking the Avatar: The Demographics of MMO Player Motivations, In-Game Preferences, and Attrition by Nick Yee
Yee, a long-time researcher into online games currently studying at Stanford University, has collected detailed data from over 35,000 MMO players through online surveys, and presents a compilation of his findings about age, gender, motivations, and addiction over all current massively multiplayer titles.

Wednesday, September 22:

MMP Database Mini-Cookbook: A Half Dozen Recipes to Aid Development by Jay Lee
This guide, by Jay Lee, lead programmer at NCSoft Austin, puts forth a number of recipes for tackling common database-related issues in massively multiplayer games, including creating unique identifiers for moving items between game shards, and finding intelligent ways to manage in-game databases for localization purposes.

Thursday, September 23:

Aviators, Moguls, Fashionistas and Barons: Economics and Ownership in Second Life by Cory Ondrejka
What happens when the residents of your online world revolt? Cory Ondrejka, vice president of product development at Linden Lab, makers of Second Life, explains the resistance to taxation in the game, and how the new model of land ownership has created intriguing results for the maintainers of this large-scale virtual world.

Friday, September 24:

Weaving the Threads: Storytelling in City Of Heroes by Sean Fish
Telling a story in a massively multiplayer game raises very different challenges to those posed by a single player game, and Fish, senior staff designer at Cryptic Studios, discusses weaving individual MMO story threads together in order to immerse, team up, and delight players who want an enduring mythos as well as great playability for their online game.

*BONUS* - Monday, September 27:

A Software Process for Online Game Tools Development by Paul Frost
Paul Frost, lead tools engineer at Turbine Software, makers of Asheron's Call, Dungeons and Dragons Online, and Middle Earth Online, looks at his company's approach to MMO tools development, discussing how the long-term support and continuing evolution of online games provides many interesting opportunities and pitfalls compared to regular tool creation.