Stewart Butterfield: "The Game Context as a Testing Ground for Social Software."

Here are my notes from Stewart Butterfield's ETCON talk, "The Game Context as a Testing Ground for Social Software."

* Raph Koster: The future of gaming isn't flashy graphics and blowing up elves,
it's average people connecting with each other.

* We built a social software oriented game and run an alpha that we eventually
had to shut down — it was so significant to peoples' lives that when we shut it
down, people all over the world logged in at the same time to cry together

* In the Game Neverending prototype, we made a social index — you could count
people as friends, acquaintances and enemies. We had a leaderboard whose
unintended result was that all newbies were flooded with requests to be
acquaintances/friends, in order to build their scores.

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