Why Do Mom's Like Boffing? By Gloria Swenson

My teenage son is active in boffing. Actually, my whole family are boffers! And often I am asked why a mother such as myself would encourage family members of all ages to continue participating in such an exercise.

Actually, it is simple.

It keeps a family together. Our whole family loves boffing. Yep, starting with what some would call "oldsters" like my husband and myself all the way down the line to our 10 year old, we all enjoy boffing! Even when our oldest comes over, she will not hesitate to grab up a boffer and go for it. (yes, its still an outdoor thing, not in the house please) But please never be too old to smile and laugh.

Stimulates Imagination. With boffers, you can be king of the hill, or fighting off a dragon and rescuing a prince (not going to find me waiting to be rescued), or taking on a pirate captain like Davey Jones. There is no limit to what you can imagine and I like that in a game.

It's not a video game. You don't need to have other stuff to use it and it get folks up off the couch.

There is no age limit! While it might be tougher for a small one to hold a boffer, I can play with a four or sixty year old. And no, you are never too old to play. When we go to SCA events, you see a wide range of ages that engage in boffing. You are also very likely to see entire family's there all together. And a tight knit family ranks high in my books!

It's Safe! You know if you ever had brothers and sisters growing up at some point you got into whatever it was they were doing. Well, sometimes kids don't take into consideration that older siblings or friends may not be fighting as hard as they seem. And older siblings are more likely to be careful where they hit. I like the fact that this is safer than the sticks and broom handles I used for swords as a kid. Especially using the SoftSwords that my son makes!

I'm not channeling my mother, Yeah I loved my mom, but everyone can remember something their parents said that to this day (whether its true or not) that makes them cringe. And among the phrases I can so remember my mother (truthfully speaking sometimes it was someone else's mother) screaming at my friends and myself were the following; "Stop that this instant!" "Your going to take someone's eye out if you keep that up!" or my favorite "It's all fun and games till I have to take someone to the hospital" (That one was true and Tommy Morris where ever you are I still cringe when I think about how I nailed you with that baseball bat when you didn't believe everyone when they said "Don't stand there man she throws the bat" Sorry). With boffing, I never have that worry!

Size is not always an advantage. When I was growing up, I had two older brothers who did not hesitate to use me as a punching bag. Yeah my parents would threaten to punish me if I didn't rat out my brothers, but my brothers always threatened to pound me if I did. So either way I went it was going to be no fun, So if I had boffers back then, maybe my child hood would have been less painful. I think it's great that you can be smaller than someone and still take them out. The bigger person may have the reach but one of my favorite shots is going for the knees and I don't have to bend down to get there.

You don't need a caravan to transport equipment! Boffers go almost anywhere. It is easy to fit them into a full car when we go camping or just about anywhere we go. We take them to the lake and buy foam squishey water balls and play water baseball. We take boffers on picnics and to the park. We never hesitate to share when we see someone watching us boff. We even take and carry them with us to local festivals when we think there might be other like minded folks.

But my favorite reason is: People smile when they boff. It's not something they even know they are doing. It may not start as a smiling thing for some folks, but if you hand someone a boffer and they forget their surroundings and start going for it the smile will come through every time. And as a mom and a person I think smiles count for a lot.

So as a mother, there isn't just one thing I like about boffing. But as you can see, there is a lot about boffing that is there to like and enjoy for the whole family. I would love to hear your thoughts.

What Creates a Good Gaming Community? By Jim Rothfork

And in that case, what creates a good game?

In an effort to figure out just what exactly draws people into a game I've done a lot of reading online about online RPGs, MMOs, etc to hopefully impact Ashianae's Journey in a positive way. There is an incredible article at Gamesutra.com called "Rethinking the MMO" which can be found here - the article is good and provides some insight on features and concepts needed in order to successfully pull off an MMO. While the article includes a great deal of information for someone willing to read a bit, the most important aspect mentioned in the article is game play that is fun. That's to say, one of the biggest game killers in game development can be "boring game play". This leads to the question of "How do you make your game fun?" It's a question that plagues me consistently, because while I can envision our game being fun, and including elements that tend to make games fun.. how can you be sure that your concept will lead to "fun" game play, and keep people engaged?

Two consistent answers seem pretty apparent in creating fun game play: an environment which is rich and full of depth, and an environment where "things" are happening. The second one may sound too easy to hold any water, but in fact is perhaps more important than the first. Depth is an important aspect of the game, but when even an encyclopedia contains said depth, it won't be enough to make the game play interesting and fun (unless of course you just enjoy reading an encyclopedia through).

The aspect of making "things" happen, and making them happen frequently however is something that consistently seems to keep players entertained... and if you've established some depth in your game, then you should theoretically have all the more fire power to make some worth while game play and activities. In the game that we first began, and continue to work on here and there when there is time is a prime example of the above condition. AWRPG (the title of the server in Active Worlds) and Draeda (the name of the game) contain mind boggling depth which includes pages and pages of developer written contain, and books full of player written history and events. However, while this depth is something that makes game play very rich, the game clearly slumps when few "things" go on, on a game wide scale. From what we've seen in the four years of running it, more activity equals more players, more interaction, and more fun.

In fact this can be seen in most of the virtual environments I've ever encountered, whether they're full blown games or not. Active Worlds itself (www.activeworlds.com) is experiencing an all time low in number of paying accounts online at one time partly due to a decrease in activity in the environment (at least, that's my argument). In all cases, you can typically trace number of active users to the amount of events going on at any given time and in turn the excitement generated by said events. So the answer seems simple - make more events, make more "things" happen. Unfortunately this is easier said than done. In fact, even in large scale games like EVE Online that appeal to thousands of players at one time, I often find myself bored and lacking *something* to do, even in an environment so deep that I can literally do anything I want. In many cases it seems that *something* does not grab me, and force me to interact in an engaging way. So the question becomes, what *things* have you seen and been a part of in online games that have made them fun, engaging, and something you didn't want to log off of? Dig deep and see what you come up with. For Active Worlds, many of those events were things like the AW version of survivor, community awards, building competitions, social gatherings, etc. In our game AWRPG, much of those events were world wide storyline events that grabbed people and compelled them to become involved.

What do you think? Is creating a fun game the biggest factor in game development and creating an online game? Share with us what keeps you engaged in the games you play, besides of course the motivational grind to be the best. And like wise, what causes a game to feel old? Is it the lack of new events, or the lack of events altogether?

If you liked what you've read, please visit us at http://thegamestudio.com

James Rothfork
http://thegamestudio.com