In any case, I think I don't agree with that philosophy. Of course, even finished features sometimes fall out for one reason or another. These days, it's accepted wisdom that you don't reveal a feature until it's done, so as to guarantee that you never let the players down. As often as we could, we laid everything bare. That sucked, frankly, because the open relationship really did matter. But we couldn't tell the players the real reasons sometimes. Usually, it was against our own wishes, because of time constraints or (rarely) orders from on high. The tensest and most difficult moments in SWG's development - and they came often - were when we had to remove something that players really liked.

Walking a mile in the players' shoes is a difficult trick to pull off even if you have the best of intentions. If anything, I think that many subsequent problems came from not listening enough, or not asking questions in advance of changes. Some have since decided that it was listening to the players too much that caused some of the design problems with SWG. The publication seems to have prompted game designer and theorist Raph Koster to blog about what he learned by adopting a more collaborationist approach to his fans.

Earlier this week, Next Generation published a short excerpt from my much longer discussion of Star Wars Gallaxies and user-generated content in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.

Star wars galaxies