There is usually a telltale sign that I am not playing an MMORPG… and the telltale sign is, I am not blogging, posting, or in any other way, ranting about game design. I haven’t mad many game design posts for the month of June, so what does that tell you? Yup, I canceled Vanguard a couple of weeks ago, and I am not playing any other MMORPGs right now. It should be no surprise, then, that I am not blogging about game design.

This might lead one to suspect that I have not been playing games. However, such is not even remotely the case. I have, indeed, been playing games, just not MMORPGs. Right after quitting Vanguard I went back to an old game I played last year, Empire Earth II. I played that for a while and plan to try some online battles with one or two friends. At the same time I wanted something different — tired of war games, tired of MMORPGs, I went to the store and found a really fun game from 2005 that is still out in a few stores: The Movies.  This is a really fun game that is part simulator, part artistic. The simulator aspect is running and balancing the money coming in/going out, for a movie studio. You start in 1920 and go to 2005 trying to win as many awards and unlock as many sets and costume designs as possible. It’s quite fun and I am currently somewhat addicted to it.

Interestingly, when playing most single-player games, I have no real urge to blog about game design, the way I do when mostly focusing on MMORPGs. The reason for this is quite simple: most single-player games are infinitely better designed and far more fun than most MMORPGs. Because single-player games do not rely on subscriptions, they only need to keep you playing for a few weeks (at most) to feel you got your money’s worth out of them. An MMORPG has to keep you playing, and keep you paying, to stay in the black. However, MMORPG designers seem to think that the way to keep you playing is to make everything take incredibly long, and thus be incredibly tedious. They don’t seem to have figured out that bored players cancel without reaching the long-term goals of the game. On the other hand, most people do play single-player games to completion, since it’s fun to do so. Single-player games are meant to be enjoyed. MMORPGs seem meant to be endured — see my earlier post about this.

And so, as long as I am playing single-player games, I will probably be posting less game design content to the blog. I may pick up with other things, or perhaps even write a review of The Movies at some point… I may even post some movies here (or links to ones I post on the official online site) if I get around to making any good ones. But I don’t think, if I stick to games like Empire Earth or The Movies, that I shall have very much to rant about. The reality is that these are solidly designed games. Now, they’re clearly not perfect, but they are fun, and my urge to rant is usually aroused by sensing a game design that is purposely set up to not be fun. That, in my view, is bad design, and I just feel the need to vent about it. (I also have this vague hope that some day, some game designer or budding developer will read this blog and actually learn something about how games should be fun, before running off and making yet another boring treadmill game, but that’s probably being way too optimistic.)

At any rate, when you see the game design rants go away for a while on my blog, it’s a telltale sign that I have stopped playing MMORPGs. This is another way of saying that pretty much all MMORPGs I have ever tried, are badly designed as games.