Q&A with Riot's Jeffrey Lin, Ph.D.
Jim Cummings on Jul 2, 2013As part of our coverage of this year's Game Developers Conference, I offered a summary of Jeffrey Lin's (Lead Designer of Social Systems for Riot Games) talk on research-informed design and his teams's work managing toxic player behavior in League...
GDC: Riot Experimentally Investigates Online Toxic...
Jim Cummings on Mar 31, 2013Riot Games has gotten a fair amount of press in recent months regarding their empirically-based research on the nature of “toxic” player behavior in League of Legends. As a result, I wasn’t surprised to find standing room only for Jeffrey...
Making failure less fail in World of Warcraft
Lauren Collister on Dec 26, 2012In my time doing a World of Warcraft ethnography, I have had to acquire many skills; perhaps the most valuable of these was the fine art of failure. Let's back up. I've been reading John Ferrara's Playful Design: Creating Game Experiences in...
How to Reduce Antisocial Behavior
Travis L. Ross on Nov 2, 2012Recently Bungie (Halo 4) and NCsoft (Guild wars 2) have both taken a very aggressive stance on antisocial behavior in chat channels. Both companies have begun to ban players who use hate speech. Now, as far as I can tell banning such behavior can...
Virtual Economies: Is less information better?
Isaac Knowles on Jun 26, 2012In the first of his promised weekly reports, Yanis Varoufakis, Valve’s new economist-in-residence, released his first analysis of a Valve game economy on Friday. In his inaugural post, Mr. Varoufakis analyzes the persistent opportunities for...
Community in Games an Interview with Ron Meiners
Travis L. Ross on May 1, 2012During a recent trip to San Francisco, Jim Cummings and I had the privilege of sitting down with veteran community manager Ron Meiners. Ron has worked in online community for fifteen plus years, from Myst to Burning Man, from Splinter Cell 3 to The...