Postmortems from Game Developer

SECTION V

The Online Frontier

Online gaming as a large-scale commercial endeavour is clearly a big part of the future of gaming. There is something uniquely thrilling about the experience of sharing a virtual world with other people. The emotional buzz and endless unpredictability of human interaction are irreplaceable.

However, it's still unexplored territory. We are still exploring ways to crystallize that fascination in a mass-market game. Like the Internet, we don't quite know what to make of it or what to do with it; we just know it's huge and interesting and it's not going away. Like 3D graphics, online multiplayer gaming has swept the industry as a technology without providing a clear blueprint for what kind of games should be made using ...