Don’t you hate it when you come up with a perfectly good theoretical argument and real life proves you wrong.

Right. But the game itself is still the same grind, and throwing a community layer over it doesn’t change that. Any game can have that added through Steam or Xfire.
It’s not quite the same. Yes, since about 2000 it’s been customary to associate a forum with a new game, and Steam and Xfire go further with “the Steam community”, chat, friends and all that. And no doubt, these things encourage gameplay. But adding a “community layer” onto a SP or simple MP game is like adding soda to scotch: You might broaden the appeal, but it’s wholly unnecessary to the point. MMORPGs, on this overextended analogy, would be like beer: there’s no integration to be made, the experience is as much community as game.
So my point was: yes, grind is grind, but a MMO game features a human social structure in the game that gives meaning to the grind, to leveling, and to wasting time in the game space.
I don’t get that effect playing any of the Orange Box games, even in multiplayer. I didn’t even get it playing OFP, a much slower, “social” game.

As for my “mixing things up” about architecture vs. exploration, that was exactly my point. “Architecture” on his reading is a rigid “top-down” mentality, whereas “Exploration” is more flexible. I’m just saying that those terms overstate it: every game needs architecture. You can playtest ideas, but you need to come up with them first. That’s why I prefer “Developer Conceit”: the developers mistakenly believe themselves to know what the user wants, and to dictate how the user plays the game. Most of us, when confronted with something that we designed but which doesn’t work in the hands of a user, will instinctively try to correct the user. It’s natural: it’s an expressive medium, and we want people to see our way. His point is nothing more than: don’t be so in love with your Idea that you ruin the chance to communicate something.

And he’s wrong about the Bioshock/Little Sister example. He posits the conflict as: A. The “Moral Choice” selling point/mechanic, where the “good choice” requires sacrificing ability and B. The “adaptive difficulty” mechanic that immediately mitigates any sacrifice made. He then suggests that A., the “Architected” moral choice should have been abandoned the moment they discovered it didn’t work.
Maybe. Or maybe it wasn’t like that at all. Maybe they had A., but playtesters found it genuinely harder, so that a not every single player could succeed by taking the “moral route”, and they introduced B. So maybe B was brought in by exploration, and the game would have been better if a little more frustration was added in.

I also felt he took some of his ethical arguments too far, and made too many generalisations, which didn’t help get his point across at times.

That said I thought he made some good points, his best when he talked directly about games and games design and I definitely found myself agreeing with a lot of the points he made.

Whereas, the payoffs in other games are predictable. Or at least, you have an expectation of reward which is usually fulfilled through increased effort/time investment. It is however, a matter of argument what the slope of the effort/reward payoff should be. I hear that there’s this profession called ‘games journalists’ who make a living over this issue.

That’s the point of massively multiplayer games. It’s not just the grind: it’s a social system. You create a basic system of intermittent reinforcement (cf. slot machines) and you pair it with a chatroom so that players can create their own social system around the game.

Right. But the game itself is still the same grind, and throwing a community layer over it doesn’t change that. Any game can have that added through Steam or Xfire.

But the division between “architecture” and “exploration” is a little heavy, and he knows it. Effectively, he’s arguing against developer conceit.

I think you’re a little mixed up. An architected game is build from the top-down, with someone saying “make it like this” (Bioshock), but an explorative game is build by people who go with the flow somewhat and build the game based on feedback (Portal and indeed anything by Valve).

And, yes, I remember him from film studies classes, and I would remind him that there is a huge technological difference between the periods 1890-1930 and 1930-1940, Talkies arrived in 1929. It took very little time for filmmakers to adapt to sound, and the “great films” followed.

Now, about the rest: on audio, he does come across as an weed-addled california surfer dude, and that’s entirely due to a culturally-infused need to maintain a metric rhythm in his speech. So he throws out “like” and “you know”, and “right” (above all on his weak points, he says ‘right’)

He’s half there. The point isn’t so much expression, but reception. In particular, you want to provide players with something that is meaningful outside the terms of the game itself.

So, he’s half there both in the WoW and the Portal examples.

For WoW (and many other MMOs), he sees with the designer’s eye that the game is pretty much devoid of meaning: there’s the grind, where leveling and game difficulty balance out, and there’s rewarding time spent. But what makes this different from Desert Bus?
Well, he recognizes there’s a reward structure. Please shoot me if I ever make another TNG reference, but it evokes the episode “The Game”, where a mind-control system was concealed as a virally popular game, which spread through the Enterprise from partner to parter faster than a case of Ferengi Neochlamydia. Only when enough bunkmates were entranced did someone approach Wesley, and poor Wil had to be uncool and figure out what it did.
If you did nothing, after a certain amount of time, the game would solve itself, and release an addiction-inducing endorphine while it took you to the next level.

That’s the point of massively multiplayer games. It’s not just the grind: it’s a social system. You create a basic system of intermittent reinforcement (cf. slot machines) and you pair it with a chatroom so that players can create their own social system around the game.

WoW does add meaning to life: for most of us, meaning is socially determined, and WoW creates a social system in which it is a central part of its system of meaning.

That’s why MMOs sell, and that’s also why, regardless of ethical situations, designing MMOs can be dangerous business: the biggest market can be grabbed by tailoring the elements towards creating an addicted community of codependent enablers. Eventually, someone’s going to amass a preponderance of evidence against a developer, showing that said developer knew they were optimizing the game to create and sustain an addicted community of codependent enablers. Then the punitive damages are going to be astronomical.

But not now. Now the profits are astronomical. And for $1B/year, you can make all the ethical quibbles you want.

It’s times like this I wish I was a tort lawyer.

As for Portal, yes, the weighted companion cube is brilliant, and it came about via exploration. But the division between “architecture” and “exploration” is a little heavy, and he knows it. Effectively, he’s arguing against developer conceit. No artist can pretend to be above his audience. If the audience hates it, either that’s not your audience or you screwed up. The flipside that he points out is that paying attention to how the game is received can actually point the way to improving the experience.
In theory, there should be nothing more rewarding for a developer of any level to observe how players actually use the software. The first years (or at least months) were a monologue, now it’s a dialogue. But if you’ve spent the last year hammering away at code, you don’t want to throw away even a day of it.