Every now and again, I open up my Tumblr account’s “Ask Me” feature, to get blog fodder from folks on the Internet. Last week, I got a gaming question that I thought we should talk about here. The question in question:

When you play games online, the physicality of them changes: for example, you click a button rather than rolling dice. Do you think this automatically makes them less fun?

As written, this question is a little loaded. Do I think the lack of actual, tangible dice automatically makes a game less fun? Automatically? No, I don’t.

I think a good user interface makes the process of button-clicking satisfying. A good UI is a pleasure to interact with, full of hearty clicks and feedback, auditory or visual, that’s almost tangible. A nice, solid UI makes play easier and richer, which can certainly measure up to just as much fun, and can sometimes be more fun.

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A few weekends ago, I started doing some quests in the Lothlórien region of LOTRO’s Middle-earth, after spending quite a bit of time away from the game. I’m in that high-level slog where I’m eking through late levels in the hopes of catching up with the end-game content, and for a while I was pretty bored. It was all “Kill 10 bears” and “Slay 8 lizards;” not very rewarding, especially after 58 levels of this stuff.

I was just about to quit again when I discovered three quests that caught my eye, for three different reasons.

// LOTRO Quest Spoilers Follow

Matt Forbeck mentioned Evoke in a comment on my previous post about didacticism, and it occurred to me that we haven’t really talked about it on the site, yet. Aside from the actual website for the game — www.UrgentEvoke.com — most of my opinion on it was formed by an interview with designer Jane McGonical on Wired‘s site:

Games support happiness … by giving us more satisfying work or concrete tasks that we can accomplish…. Studies have shown that playing a short game — having something concrete that you can accomplish — actually gives you the motivation, energy and optimism to go back and tackle real work.

[Read More at Wired ]

It’s a crash course in how to start a venture, a business, that can tackle these problems [of poverty, disease, hunger] at a local level…. By the end of the game you have developed a real-world pitch for a venture [and] have acquired mentors to help you make it real. If you play the game you’re connected to somebody in the real world who has entrepreneurial experience to mentor you; you’ve also developed skills to make you a better problem solver.

[Read More at Wired ]

Did you see this article in the New Yorker about Random House’s video-game division?

Though I’ve long complained that my generation has failed some enormous life test by not leaving behind its video games in childhood, that’s always been the nervous argument of a crank. Instead of squeezing out other art forms (like books) video games might simply be another venue for telling stories. And their wide audience and increasing complexity are good things for the people who tell those stories.

[Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/03/random-house-game-on.html#ixzz0h8Na9Naf ]

Paizo honcho Eric Mona is on YouTube talking about the state and fate of tabletop RPGs, as seen and heard as the GamesU 2009 keynote at NeonCon. A lot of what he says is well known to folks in the RPG business, and all of it should be. Best of all, Mona tells it all well, laying out a lot of data in a way that’s easy to grok. If you’ve got an hour and six minutes to spend checking in on the state of the modern RPG, and you haven’t already watched it, this is a good way to spend that time.

// See it? What’d you think?