Slaughtering Sacred Cows - Richard Bartle at IMGDC 2007

In interviews, keynotes, and roundtables Richard Bartle tours the challenges of independent design and challenges developers to go beyond conventional design constraints. Ten Ton Hammer seeks to summarize this online gaming luminary's many insights at the recent Indie MMO Game Developers Conference.

" But not Richard Bartle's real reason for staying current in the games industry. "Most of all," Bartle explained, "I want to be surprised for once." MUDs are more creatively fertile than graphical MMOs (for the same reason that books are more creatively fertile than movies – that is, visuals limit the imagination), and in his time he's heard a lot of "unique" ideas for MUDs, of which "magic returns to a world destroyed by cataclysm" seems to rank high on everyone's "unique" idea list."

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