Jessica Mulligan

Where Bartle's book seems to be aimed at academics, this book often seems to be aimed at executives. Mulligan and Patrovsky start out making the (now-conventional, but still worth repeating) case that PWs are a service, not a product - good. They then seem to argue so fixedly for a waterfall process that I wanted to throw the book across the room. They repeately point out that MMO development is young, but seem to think they can still get the cast-in-stone up-front design that's only possible in very-well-understood application domains. If you can get through another hundred pages, they moderate the language enough to seem a bit more reasonable, but you need to grit your teeth to get there. The writing quality is poor, and the book seems padded; for example, statistics (or exhortations) are frequently repeated three or more times in the same chapter, only slightly rephrased, to no apparent end. The last third of the book is articles from other writers - generally quite good, but not coherent. Several… (more)