Terra Nova

The Liabilities of Licenses

One of the observations about Star Wars: Galaxies that I've made pretty much since the game went live was that the license was more a problem than an asset. That observation applies to the convoluted financial arrangements underpinning the game, but more, it applies as a comment on design challenges.

What does a MMOG designer need to do to take proper advantage of a license? Is a license reason to clamp down on innovation, or an opportunity to innovate?

How big is YOUR server?

A nice element of the FFXI interface is the ability to search your server population for a multitude of things such as total population, and population broken down by such things as job class, rank, and level. A few days ago there was an excellent post on the Allakhazam site, about the server population for the world of Hades. The numbers seem to stack up to my own more informal census of my server, Lakshmi. I've seen highs of around 3400 and lows down around 1400 (usually after an update or during a DDoS attack). Normal range is around 2500 with regular dips and peaks as each market comes into primetime.

No thank you

Just to let all the spammers out there know - here at the TerraNova global media HQ, well at least in my palatial penthouse office suite, we are full to over flowing with prescription meds, genital extension / expansion  / engorgement aids, cheap mobile phones, low rate mortgage packages, offers to help out relatives of ex-high up people in far flung countries that just happen to have millions of dollars that they would love to entrust  to us (for a small admin fee of course). And personally I don’t have the time to meet potential brides from Russia, what with all the WoW playing and eBay’ing I need to do to pay for the hookers and crack.

So to this end - you, good readers, might notice that the comment section on threads mysteriously closes for no good reason. This is NOT because we have grown bored of the topic or think that the commentary we are getting is just not up to standard or an attempt to shut down on anyone's rights to yell at us.  It’s simply because certain threads seem to attract spam engines and get filled up with junk, junk that some might find offensive, so when this happens we will try to clear it out and then probably close comments. When this starts happening to a current thread one of us will try to trim out the spam so we can keep things going. 

MMOG eSport?

I've just returned from DreamHack, an event billed as the "worlds largest LAN party" (over 6000 participants). It took place in three convention halls, two being filled with rows and rows of people with their machines as well as some exhibitors (and the third used for sleeping). Last time I was at something like this if you wandered around peering at people's machines to see what they were up to you saw the usual mix of things like CounterStrike, movies, music files, instant messaging, etc. What took me by surprise this time (though certainly shouldn't have given what I see in our own game labs with students) is the amount of WoW being played. I dare say it outnumbered the times I saw CS on someone's monitor but I don't want to stretch my observational data too far. Suffice to say it was immensely popular. I kept making passes Friday night by a group of eight players who were in an Onyxia raid (heh, I won't try and tally how many times I saw "Release spirit now" on the screen) and there was always a fair number of others milling around them watching too.

Pulling for Attention

A  year ago I wrote "Language is power in MMOs" (MMO Language as a Power-up).  Recently Ross Mayfield (Many2Many) extended this with ideas on Social Verbs.  He concludes a pull model of attention management is better than a push-based model as such would be based on interruptions that won't scale in social software.  Furthermore, asynchronous interaction empowers users with choice and ability to control their pace.  Kaye Vivian (Dove Lane, Nov. 23) suggests that social verbs provide low-risk means of exploring social contact.

Another thought here involves the value of protocol to establish the structure by which we can push back and take action while minimizing social risk (e.g. in turn-based systems, ref. Is Love and War Turn-based).  Dramatically, "Sorry, I really had to invade..."  Or more opportunistically, how the expectation of a "thank you" after a gift exposes another moment for conversation.

I also found myself the other night musing upon the "Need vs. Greed" dialog window in WoW...

Zimmerman’s Dev Rights

Given the current debacle over Star Wars Galaxies and the rights that Sony Online Entertainment may or may not have to go changing SWG into what some see as effectively a different world - Eric Zimmerman’s recent intervention into what it is to be a game dev is most timely.

Titled “A Bill of Rights for Game Developers” Zimmerman outlines 13 Points (summarized below but explained in full over at Gamasutra) that focus on the developer as an individual with a set of putative rights. It's a fine follow up to Koster’s famous Declaration of the rights of Avatars and an interesting take, from the perspective of people at the code-face, on a wide range of issues discussed over here at TN. 

ARGs and Utopian Dreams

Ron Meiners contributes an essay about the social possibilities in alternate reality - from Burning Man to Last Call Poker.  A selection: "The ARG creates a median space between the two poles: participatory but guided. Social, but driven by the need for collaboration and the self-selection of the participants and the underlying knowledge that the space is ultimately a protected one...which creates very strong social ties and consistently transformative personal experiences that she [Jane McGonigal] described as “pronoia” – the irrational conviction that the world is conspiring to your benefit in subtle and consistent ways..."

Order 66

Some time ago, I wrote here at Terra Nova that MMOGs really don't get a "do-over", that later changes to the game almost necessarily sit on top of old mechanics, that design is cumulative.

The live management team for Star Wars: Galaxies set out to prove me wrong with their "combat upgrade" and "Jedi revamp" a while back, and I watched with some interest. I couldn't see how they planned to change the rest of the game at the same time as the combat upgrade, given how tight the interdependencies of the game were. In fact, I predicted on the official SWG forum that any serious attempt to realize the ambitions of the combat revamp was going to take a major rethinking of the entire profession system and crafting along with it.

I was closer to the mark than I would have guessed: the live management team recently and with breathtaking suddenness announced and then pushed to live a massive overhaul of the entire game, the so-called "New Game Enhancement" or NGE. Unfortunately, the live management team seems to have ignored another long-standing criticism of SWG by many observers: that their design and implementation process is a disastrous mess. Never more so than with the NGE: whatever it is conceptually, in practice, it's roughly on par with an alpha build of a MMOG.

Or did they ignore it? It's just possible that SWG's latest flaming car wreck resulted from deliberately driving over a cliff.

Book and Volume

Grand Text Auto is kind of our evil (good?) twin in the industry/academic video gaming collablog space -- a bunch of really smart folks blogging together about games.  While we focus mainly on virtual worlds here, GTxA focuses mainly on interactive fiction.  (If you don't read it regularly, there's an index here with a topical list of posts.)

Besides being smart, the GTxA folks are creative to boot.  Most of our readers are probably familiar with the ground-breaking Façade by Stern and Mateas, hailed by the New York Times and gaming theory guru Chris Crawford.  Last week, Nick Monfort, author of Twisty Little Passages, released Book and Volume -- an interactive fiction work available for free online.  If you're interested in thinking about future possibilities of the MMOG form (i.e. is there an alternative to rat-whacking and FedExing?) you should take a look at this stuff.  Plus, it's free -- can't beat that.

Interview with a Price Fixer

I've noted elsewhere that I've been spending some time getting a handle on the WoW economy, and wanted to report from time to time of my adventures in the auctionhouse (AH). Today, I wanted to talk about the AH and price fixing, and to share with you a few thoughts from a practitioner of what can only be described as "Economic PvP." His name is Alex Tabony and below the fold we discuss the nature of the AH, the problems with relying on certain types of add-ons, and how you can game others within the AH.

Read on...

A Massive Matrix

Attention players of The Matrix Online: prepare to get served

Delusions of granter

One thing that I've been thinking about a lot lately is my set of experiences over the past two years reviewing for large grant agenices. While my experience is still a bit limited, it has been intense, and I have developed some impressions (and that is really all they are, given anyone's limited point of view relative to these funding agencies) about the current trends in social science research on technology in general (and virtual worlds in particular)...

I need a hero

All video games are works of ideology. Often the ideology is so much akin to that of society in which they are developed and consumed that it goes un-noticed.

Games that surface an agenda stick out. A case in point is the new mobile game Airport Insecurity by Persuasive Games. Works that have government backing stick out still further. A couple of years ago America’s Army was the hot topic. So it should come as no surprise after the recent coverage of gaming in China that the Chinese government would want to get in on the act too. Step forward (or is that march forward) Chinese Hero Registry a Virtual World that the blogshpere suggests is planned to be developed by Shanda on behalf of the Chinese government.

Methical in MSM

The Methical EQ II dupe story has made it to the mainstream media.  Mark Turner writes a piece for the Financial Times about the incident (mentioned previously here), quoting Ted and Josh, among others.  Ted says: "The phase we're in right now is that everyone is ­trying to apply the proper metaphor. This is terra nova; a lot of these phenomena are frontier phenomena."

The Disappeared

When my kids were younger I introduced a small fiction about the fate of avatars and monsters I encountered in games.  They did not die, I did not kill them, they just disappeared.  Intended as a gentler exile, it was also a softer verb that blurred cause and effect...

Secondary Market Sinks

To prvent gold piece inflation, designers build in "sinks", places where currency drains from the system. What about using that metaphor to defuse incentives to secondary market trading?

Industry Bodies

Why isn’t there a trade body to represent the interests of virtual world developers?

In the UK we have trade associations for body piercers, cartoonists, the greetings card industry, television camermen, packaging companies and homeopaths, among others. Why isn’t there any organisation at all for virtual world developers?

Goods and Services

In looking at the economics of WoW, I've been struck by the absence of a market for services. There is an active market for items, of course, since Blizzard built this into the system and, as we've discussed many times before, it's really hard to build a game-style MMOG that doesn't develop its own internal market for valuable items. But there is almost no market for services, either game-supported or player-created.

The Future Cost of a Good Synthetic World

Linear projections out of the current data set are completely irresponsible and should be avoided at all costs. But I just can't resist the temptation.

A film like Return of the King costs something like $100m to make, for perhaps ten hours of entertainment (I've watched the film 3 times). That's $10m per hour. Now, a good SW occupies users for more time than that. An intense user will go in for 40+ hours weekly, for three or five years. Let's be more conservative and say it is 25 hours a week for one year. 25x52 = 1,300 hours. 1,300 hours of entertainment produced Hollywood-style would cost $13b. The projection suggests that a fully mature game industry might be willing to put $13 billion into the construction of a fantasy world that provides entertainment, in terms of quality and time, equialent to to watching a string of great movies 3 or 4 hours a day, for a year.

It's an irresponsible calculation, but it just makes me think that, well, we may be pouring truly massive amounts of money into synthetic world creation in the future.

Call Me Afraid

I was reflecting upon the differences between turn-based and real-time game worlds.  In the summer I started this train of thought with "Is Love and War Turn-based?".  There the claim was that the meaning to the pauses between turns was different than,  say, the moments in a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game,  or to the half-hours in MMOG grinds.  I  also think the meaning of fear is different.

News Miscellany + Oubliette!

A few interesting news notes if people want to comment:

1) The EFF has a critical take on Blizzard's "Warden" software that scans user drives.  Kind of old news here -- Jess posted on this back in August and it was discussed then.  Eric Goldman's take on a similar flap about Sony's EULAized scanware is here.  (Update from Ross Smith in the comments: this is too funny -- according to Security Focus,  Sony's rootkit hack will reportedly let WoW hackers escape Warden's detection by adding a "$sys$" prefix to file names.)

2) There were apparently reports on Pacific Epoch of a "mass suicide" protest on China's WoW servers to protest the new fatigue regulations, noted here previously.  As usual, it's hard to get independent confirmation or details.  (Here's another story today from Pacific Epoch about an unusual "hunger strike.") (Update: Joystiq points to a virtual funeral for another player who reportedly died from overplaying -- so I guess these people might support the regulations?)

3) Are "virtual" things bad for you?  It's a question as old as Plato, but it's still very much alive. Joystiq takes up the old questions with a NY Times health editorial where a psychologist states:

The growth of technology has cleaved us from the reality of self, as well. We say that we are "going" places on the Internet without ever leaving the room. In elaborate Internet-based games, people pay thousands of dollars to own "real estate" that isn't real at all.

Can't say how many times we've talked about that before.

4) Speaking of Plato, do you want to try your hand at a pre-MUD MMORPG MMORPG-resembling thinget?  (Richard can clarify why this really wasn't a MMORPG).  Then read on: