Quote:Original post by kasbati
1. what are some unique game applications?
Can you think of a new game application which you haven't heard of?

With regards to research, rather than asking random people for their ideas on the internet (most of which will either be lame, or be ideas they prefer not to share with you -- and usually both) I recommend you watch for changes in the market and explore what's happening there. Changes in hardware make new things possible, and that drives technical progress and some design aspects (particularly more physically-based gameplay due to improved processing speeds). More than anything else though, where the most diverse ideas have been coming from recently tend to be due to innovations in input devices. Nintendo's DS and Wii provide radically unconventional modes for human / computer interaction, and these have sure enough inspired some very new and different styles of gameplay.

While on the topic of input devices driving gameplay (or human/computer interaction design at large), check this awesome technology out: http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/

Quote:Original post by kasbati
2. The ESRB have used "T" rating on all MMOGs. It's not necessarily accurate.
Why is this?

It's not really possible for a game developer to know how to assign such a rating when the experience depends predominantly on however random people on the internet behave. In most games that have both a single-player and a multi-player component, you'll typically see some sort of warning next to the rating -- "may not be applicable to online play" or something to that effect. While the game itself may not offer any overtly mature content, this says nothing about what other players will provide.

In short, in any socially focused game like an MMO, the gameplay experience is dictated by the attitudes and behaviors of the players -- and that you cannot capture on the box with a letter.

Quote:Original post by kasbati
3. What are the benefits and advantages of developing turn based real-time games?

I'm guessing you mean to contrast turn-based and real-time, since "turn-based real-time" comes off as an oxymoron. Basically, this dictates the gameplay experience and the modes of connectivity generally.

Since it's unreasonable to expect people to stand around waiting arbitrarily long amounts of time for other people to take their turns, turn-based games either have to strike an arrangement between having short time limits or they can alternatively allow people to play ongoing games that they check in on for a few minutes every day or couple of days. This form of communication is very high latency, in the sense that it can be a while between when events take place in the game. Often this will evolve to have each turn be increasingly involved, so that when the player does check in on that rare occasion to take their turn, they can be greeted with a satisfying complexity to the choices to be made. In this sense, the communications made are said to be of fairly high throughput -- where a lot of data is transmitted per turn.

Real-time games are the opposite end of the spectrum, being low latency (if you think of a "real-time" game as being made up of many, many tiny turns that progress at a rapid pace) and low throughput since, for any given moment of time, there's a pretty narrow range of options to choose from (move left? Move right? Attack? Do nothing? Etc).

On the technical side, turn-based games are probably much easier to develop since many aspects of physical simulation, graphics, and communication can be abstracted to a great extent -- yet is more difficult to design and balance properly. For real-time games on the other hand, it's a fairly simple matter to throw together some ideas for a very simple physical simulation for some arcade-style action play (like asteroids, for example)...but then you have some mathematically crunchy problems to contend with, requiring efficient graphical rendering for good framerates, varying degrees of sophistication with physical simulations (including collision detection and response, etc), and having to worry about keeping latency to a minimum for networked multiplayer scenarios.

Besides that though, for the design side...it's really a matter of what kind of audience you want to make games for, and what you would prefer to make.

1. Not sure what you mean.
2. Why do you say it isn't accurate? BTW, the ratings also say "Game experience may change during online play". That means that the user-generated content (including what people say and do) isn't part of the rating.
3. You need to be more specific. Is it possible for a game to be both real-time and turn-based?