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Raph Koster has an interesting post up on socialization. I’m posting to highlight this part:

But it bears repeating, because there are many voices out there that will decry anything that resembles “social engineering.” But the shape of your map is social engineering; the layout of your buildings, the colors on your HUD, the placement of your text box — it’s all social engineering. We need to get past the simplistic observation that we shouldn’t treat users like ants in an art farm, and get real about the fact that we do have significant impacts on what our users do and how and when they do it.

It’s difficult to overstate how important social engineering is in online environments. Ignoring it achieves nothing. Depending on how you utilize it, you can create a game where newbies are valued (City of Heroes shortly after superbases and newbies generating the base equivalent of money) or abused (Shadowbane allowing you to train players and loot their corpses in the protected newbie lands). Social engineering is how you setup your game environment, and it has a huge impact on retention. Choosing to ignore social engineering is the equivalent of ignoring character advancement in an achievement-driven RPG, except the results are more insidious.

Let’s take a brief look at some of the common Game of the Year contenders, shall we?

• Gears of War 2
• Grand Theft Auto IV
• Fallout 3
• Dead Space
• Braid
• Left 4 Dead
• Fable II
• Little Big Planet
• Metal Gear Solid 4
• World of Goo
• Wrath of the Lich King

Reading that (incomplete) list, none of them really strike a chord with me for GOTY. I enjoyed many of them, but there’s just something missing.There are a couple indie games in the list, but even those were moderately well-known before they launched. In a way, this makes the situation worse, because a few games eat up all the press coverage while most go unnoticed. But that’s another rant that you’ve probably all hearda dozen times. Instead, I’ll talk about a game!

Now that I’ve played Spirit Engine 2 a lot, it’s seriously contending for my not-sought-after-favor for 2008 game of the year. The game gets better the longer I play. It’s still not that well known, but it got high marks in Gametunnel’s GOTY lists (#1 RPG, #2 overall). The game really deserves more attention. This is another case where I’m clearly the target audience, but damn is it providing a lot more fun than I got out of any of the titles above. Admittedly, I just got World of Goo and have only played a few minutes, so that’s a little unfair.

I really enjoy the combat system. You can’t approach fights with the typical, “Attack, Attack, Attack” button-mashing mentality that’s common in turn-based and pseudo-turn based RPGs. Even duplicating tactics that worked on the previous fight is not always a good idea, as there is a lot of variety in the monsters and their abilities even within a single area. Occasionally, I see someone complain about the grind in the game, but I haven’t ever had to replay an area and there are only a few fights in each area. Some fights drag on as I struggle to put enemies down and keep them there, but I found that was almost always because I was employing a poorly thought-out strategy. A little adaptation quickly solves the problem.

This is where I really ought to give the game a proper commentary, but I’d rather go play.