I’ve been mulling over a question for a few days about how we choose which MMOs to play. What draws us to one game world over another, how some attributes are more important to each of us than others. I’m going to be writing more about it towards the end of the week, but I wanted to share a bit of a prelude today.
You see, today I finally added my name to the list of people who have deleted their Googe+ account. I’d grown weary and tired of the constant non-arguments about why they want to prevent pseudonymity. A ZDNet article made it fairly clear – Google+ is an identity service first and a social network second. Now things make sense. I don’t need another identity management service, so I nuked my account.
I can already hear you wondering “But Gaz, what does this have to do with MMOs or gaming at all?”
An MMO at its most basic is a single player role playing game with a multiplayer chatbox. Slightly more advanced games invoke more social network features – friends lists, guilds and so on. Games developers realised early on is that it doesn’t matter how gamers identify themselves to each other that matters – it’s what they experience while playing the game that’s important.