Even though online games have been around since 1969, the industry is still in its infancy. As this book is being finished in the winter of 2002, there are well over 100 for-pay online games in development, but only about two or three hundred people who have gone through the development process from soup to nuts. That isn't a lot of frontline experience to go around for an industry that is expected to grow in the double digits every year for the next three to five years .
It was our intention from the start to include some supporting articles written both by us and a few of those 200 people. The purpose was not necessarily to back up the text of this book; some of the points made in these articles take a decidedly different tack. Rather, the purpose was to provide post-mortems, opinions , and alternate views from other experienced developers so the reader could see more than one side of some these thorny issues. Some articles, such as Damion Schubert's "The Lighter Side of Meridian 59's History," amuse while demonstrating some of the issues that can rise up out of nowhere and slap a developer in the face. Others, such as Talin's "Managing Deviant Behavior in Online Worlds" and Jonathan Baron's "Glory and Shame," contain serious discussions on elements of persistent world (PW) management that are often overlooked by developers and which have killed more than one game post-launch .
Some of the original articles were months or years old, so we asked the authors to update them, which they kindly did. A couple of them, including the post-mortems on Anarchy Online and Dark Age of Camelot by Gaute Godager and Matt Firor, respectively, are original to this book. The key to understanding what this section is all about is simple: The authors all have direct experience developing and managing PWs. What they write contains information that will be invaluable to those developing or managing PWs. In other words, the reader is getting the benefit of direct experience, straight from the horses' mouths.
Is there anything more valuable than that?
