Zonk did an interesting record with Ed Stark and Dave Williams, employees for an MMO creator named Red 5 (and practiced tabletop game designers). They talk about their ideas and plans to bring about the next step in MMO gaming: increased persistence in online worlds, where an objective, once completed, stays completed. Williams said, "Right now for most of these games, when the player saves the princess and he starts walking away from the tower — if he looks back he's going to see the princess at the top of the tower again." as regards their current work, he continues: "If you save the village, it stays saved — you saved it! But maybe now that village becomes an objective for another player; maybe being has to be done now because that village wasn't destroyed. And so on, and so on, and so on. architecture those mechanisms to make it a world that reacts to a player's actions instead of current in a static state. That's the world we're talking about."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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