Suttree.com: Casual Games, Social Software by Duncan Gough

It’s another post about games and social software, so I’ll keep it brief.

Digg took user-generated content and social software and made a tech news site using a simple premise of the stories with the most votes get the most attention. I always understood it to work like that but there’s also a clear political side to the site design that states that Digg is a democratic news website. One person, one vote. So, watching the inevitable gaming of digg (sign up a couple of accounts and digg your own story repeatedly, or use your friends, or tailor the submission to appeal to the younger audience of digg), plenty of people have made this ‘democratic website’ strand the focus of their objections. Digg is suffering some ‘voting irregularities’ and their users are clearly making it known that the democracy of digg is what pulls them in. Digg’s USP - one person, one vote - has obviously become quite a crucial component, hence their recent moves to iron things out.

Eve Online, on the other hand, differs itself from all other MMO by pooling all users into a single shard, meaning that every player online is in the same virtual world, rather than being load-balanced across mulitple servers into groups of players located nearby. Recently, Eve launched in China and created a separate shard just for the Chinese. Whilst these hasn’t seen any noticeable negativity from the Western Eve players, PlayNoEvil has some interesting answers to the question of how CCP structure the Eve galaxy.

There’s clearly a concern that Eve may not scale as a single shard, leading to a breaking away from their USP of everyone online in the same world. If there’s anything social software can teach games in this instance, it’s that a social news site like digg has taken a lot of flak for a perceived weaking of its’ USP. Hopefully CCP will take note and avoid sharding for as long as possible.

And finally, if you want more Eve porn, here’s a comprehensive article about their servers - EVE Online Launches Largest Supercomputer in the Gaming Industry Running on IBM Server Technology.