It’s, at this point, old news that World of Goo has had a rate of piracy between 80% – 90%. I don’t want to discuss the oft-debated discussions of DRM, sales, and any of that stuff.

One thing that seems overlooked that is probably worth noting, though :

That 80%-90%? They installed a program illegally onto their computer, with a known phone-home feature, and left it plugged in to the net.

“You move like an insect. You think like an insect. You are an insect… Take care not to fall too far out of my favour. Patience is not characteristic of a Goddess.“

SHODAN is the evil AI directly or indirectly responsible for most of the player character’s trials and tribulations throughout the System Shock and System Shock 2 games. She — although a genderless machine, SHODAN’s dominant voice and personality usually earns the female pronoun — is also one of the creepier and more memorable villains in the computer gaming world.

That’s not because she’s particularly powerful. Even in System Shock, she’s not particularly dangerous in her boss modes. What really gets the hairs on the back of your neck standing straight up is not her power or her intellect, but her personality.

SHODAN is other. The game rubs in your face that she’s not a human, and she doesn’t have normal human motivations. SHODAN isn’t just a megalomaniac, she knows she’s a deity, and she proves it. That’s the frightening part. That’s what makes a single voiceover far scarier than a dozen cat scares or monsters jumping from closets.

She watches you throughout the entire game. She knows what you are planning, and she will stop you once you stop being useful. You’re not a pawn to her; a pawn is smarter and more powerful. The player is nothing but an insect, to be carefully tapped toward a goal and crushed when the experiment is over.

It’s an excellent way to play on paranoia, and it works in ways the average psychotic killer or mustachioed megalomaniac would not.

Don’t let programmers design.

Don’t remove programmers from your design cycle.

Okay, that’s not helpful advice. Let’s be more accurate.

Designers need to be as varied as your sales targets should be. Programmers need to think like programmers. Let’s face it; no one who can deal with a few thousand lines of C++ is still going to think like a normal user.

Normal users don’t think like normal users. Look at the demographics of any given group. A little over 50% of the population in the English-speaking world is female. Nearly one in ten is left-handed. Between one in twenty and one in a hundred like the company of those of the same gender a bit different than the other portion of the populace. Just under one in one-hundred and fifty of the next generation may land somewhere significant on the various autism spectrum disorders. As many as 3% of the next generation will be diagnosed with ADHD. Color-blindness, directional language preferences, whether your users were hooked on phonics, a thousand different attributes that you’ll never find in a single team.

You can’t have that on a development team, not without having a small country worth of people, and each attribute can easily change you how a user looks at an application, often to massive degrees.

Some of them you can simulate. Most forms of color-blindness aren’t hard to correct for, and doing so is strongly suggested for anything starting at a web page, which is good since color-blind artists are not exactly common. Left-handness can be mimicked, although it’s amazing how often you’ll run into issues if you don’t design for it from the ground up. Others aren’t so easy.

Don’t design with just programmers. It’s a good thing to know what can and can’t be done well from the code. But you can’t have a programming team that understands how people think, and you can’t afford to wait until late beta or post-release to discover that your user customization drives even one in a hundred people crazy. Far too many games and programs have made that mistake.

Left-click menu? Well, maybe not. 90% of you, if not more, think right-click. One in ten of the American population is left-handed, though. It’s amazing how many instructions rely on this distinction.

The context menu is a great, intuitive control. It’s also about as fun to describe as chewing rocks.

A lot of left-handed individuals quickly get used to reversing right-click and left-click, or simply use their right hands. Most tech support questions from people used to a program, or from people willing to adjust to a system quickly.

Internal menus, CTRL- commands, anything keyboard or basic single click. Anything that’s truely universal.

Remember, you want an application that will not merely be used, but actively supported. Make it easy for those who provide support.

Tabula Rasa is intended to close February 2009.

This probably isn’t much of a surprise for those who’ve been paying attention. Depending on where you look, most estimates suggest that Tabula Rasa only had around 30-40k box sales in the first place, and lost a hefty number of players after the first month. There are no official player population numbers being released — never a good sign — but it doesn’t look like it ever got much of a player base jump. Worse, this was a game that had been redesigned several times; it cost significantly more than most other MMOs to develop. In many ways, it’s surprising that the game has lasted this long.

A few groups are hoping to keep the game alive. If you enjoyed the game — I know I did, and I have the collector’s edition to prove it — those may be of interest to you.

The death of this MMO is unfortunate for a number of reasons, but it’s worth paying attention to, if only to see how people think about it.

NCSoft

NCSoft’s North American sector is not faring well, and probably won’t get a second chance like it did before. This is the second game NCSoft has closed that was built and bred for the western market, and despite the big name, it managed to hurt them quite a bit. They’re not going to make that mistake again, and that means NCSoft Austin is going to be in unpleasant shape even before Champions Online comes out.

Station Pass is probably going to remain a niche concept. It’s worked wonders for Sony Online, but if it wasn’t appealing to NCSoft here, there’s little reason to believe it’ll attract the attention of other, normal game developers.

Harder SciFi — at least, SciFi harder than the comic book Science! of City of Heroes — is probably gone for the near future. Whether it’s because SciFi MMORPGs just are a harder sell, or because SciFi MMOs have just been garbage, the risks look stupidly high.

This presents a certain opportunity for developers willing to take a risk, but it also means getting capital is going to be messier than normal for games or groups of games under the above system.

Players

This is the second game in as many years that NCSoft has closed down completely. More than anything else, game closures are the single greatest fear the average player holds, as they involve losing hundreds if not thousands of hours of gameplay. There’s going to be a lot of player suspicion about any adventurous games through NCSoft, or even anything with a box price.

Rightly or wrongly, a lot of the issues with Tabula Rasa have been attributed to the lackluster end-game and faction-based PvP content. That may not be accurate, but players are going to be much more wary of games without a well-defined end-game.

Designers

What’s your take? What do you think killed Tabula Rasa, and how do you think this particular fate is going to change how you design games in the future?