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May 31, 2007

Comments

1.

Interesting. I've often thought that even just a DVD-style behind the scenes documentary as a game was made could be quite illuminating.

I do recall quite vividly, Tim, your reaction to the process that Mark Terrano & I went through at Ludium I, where the group created a game as part of the discussion process. My recollection is that you were somewhat taken aback by some aspects of how we went about it, but I'd love for you to elaborate on the thoughts you had back then.

2.

Yeah, this is obviously a continuing fascination for me. I think one of the things that really interested me about your approach was that you guys thought about game formalisms very clearly and early in the process (score one for the ludologists over the hermeneuticians, I guess)--but also maybe that you were quick to pare down some of the possible design pathways forward so that some of the blue-sky thinking one might indulge didn't happen. Which seems practical and appropriate to a time-constrained enterprise, but maybe also seems to me to have something to do with an industry approach in which some kinds of alternative paradigms are considered to have failed before they're even discussed.

What I guess I wonder about a bit too is where the points in current design processes might be where folks with good ideas but little technical ability might "plug in" usefully. With films, for example, one source of creative inflow from outside the technical world of film-making is in screenwriting. Screenwriters only need to know the conventions of screenwriting, but they can often serve as an important conduit for new narratives, new kinds of characterization, fresh dialogue, and so on. It seems to me intuitively that game design lacks that kind of open portal for new kinds of thinking about content and the structure of play to enter the picture. But I don't really know enough to say for sure.

3.

I suspect it's the sort of thing that you think of right as the game ships: you look back--perhaps popping whatever year-old milestone builds you can find into the machine--and are all, "Dang! If only we'd been gathering material for a 'making of' all this time!"

It would be really neat. In this the age of blog you'd think at least written day-by-days would be available, but enough of it just shouldn't be public that it might not get put down at all.

I don't think the problem is that there's not enough input of good ideas--though more is always better--but that good ideas are throttled later in the process.

Sometimes publishers do it, choosing something safe and mediocre over something untried but potentially great; sometimes developers do it to themselves, running out of time and falling back on something easier or just executing poorly on something novel. I think this last is the most dangerous, as people say, "of course idea X won't work; game Y shackled it to a horribly flawed combat system and everyone hated that game!"

But, yeah, there is no good equivalent to the screenplay. Not that a good screenplay guarantees a good movie, but games seem to have more distance between the cup and the lip.

4.

Timothy Burke

"The discussion of Nate Combs' recent post about the current hubbub over at EVE Online made me think a bit about the process of design in virtual worlds."
"I think players and scholars alike have very little grasp on the conceptual vocabulary involved in design, and I think that often makes for complicated antagonisms between developers and those with an interest in the products they develop. When live management teams have to deal with a crisis in a given synthetic world, they're often not trusted by players precisely because players have almost no ability to conceptualize what's going on inside the design process. "

Are you trying to say that noone's responsible - at least morally - for the mess the " live management team " created ? Why so , pretty please ? Because the " work " is structurated ? Because the nazis were just doing their PAID job and just followed the orders ? Because the " decisions " were made at many different levels ? So what ?! You have an entity acting like a mafia , then simply telling : " ....the allegations are false " , based on Photoshoped " proves " ....tell me more about trust. I dont need any special " ability to conceptualize " , i saw the facts with my own eyes and i dont give a f about what's happening " inside the design process " , i'm interested and i pay for the final product you sell to me. In the price i pay ,the salary of " live management teams " is included . Even if the " live management team " is formed by volunteers , they have their sort of profit , and the Company as well.

5.

I'd love to try and write up something of how things work here, and what goes on, but it would take a lot of time. Maybe I'd have to cover things like corporate structure separately from things like design / production process.

6.

Amarilla: no, I'm not saying that at all.

One of the conceptual frameworks that I find very powerful and use quite a lot is to see development teams in synthetic worlds as sovereignties. Now, mind you, before Richard pops up to point out that they're not governments but gods, they're sovereignties who have powers and capacities that don't exist in the real world.

So with the EVE Online live management team, we've really got a problem that's best understood in terms of a relationship between citizens and sovereigns. In general, what happens inside live management in ALL existing MMOGs is opaque to the citizen-players. This leads to all sorts of speculation and frustration. It's not just that information is being hidden from players, but that players can't even really imagine the processes involved in decision-making.

With some real-world governments, I at least have an idealized model of how decisions get made, and in some cases, there's sufficient transparency to let me compare the actual lived process of decision-making to my civics-textbook model. With MMOGs, we don't really have either the idealized model or the transparent look into the reality.

That creates a lot of friction even when things are going well. When things are not going well, it's pouring gasoline on a fire. I think players of EVE are at this point forced into a conspiracy discourse, and the developers are encouraging that, because there isn't any other possible way to interpret how and why things happen the way they happen in EVE with live events and so on. I suppose one could argue that an unscrupulous, conspiratorial developer-sovereign actually *fits* with the "magic circle" of EVE, but I'd still say that if there is any developer that REALLY needs to look at transparency as the solution to their problems, it's CCP.

7.

This isn't as long and detailed as you've described, but here is one insider's look at the development of Dark Sun Online: Crimson Sands, an early MMO.

www.gamasutra.com/features/19971024/index.htm

8.

Actually, I think my Worlds For Study project might be able to provide just this type of public display of the design process. I am adopting an entirely open process, for the simple reason that the market I am targeting (academics) will pretty much demand it.

The platform design needs to be developed pretty publicly so that academics can weigh in and make it what they want. The content design process will need to be pretty public too, because other academics will need to verify that participants are getting adequate education (if the participants are students who are getting course credit) or that the results are reliable and interesting (if the data are being submitted to peer review.

Of course, I am still trying to sell people on the "soup" course; nuts seem very far away right now.

9.
you were quick to pare down some of the possible design pathways forward so that some of the blue-sky thinking one might indulge didn't happen. Which seems practical and appropriate to a time-constrained enterprise, but maybe also seems to me to have something to do with an industry approach in which some kinds of alternative paradigms are considered to have failed before they're even discussed.

What I guess I wonder about a bit too is where the points in current design processes might be where folks with good ideas but little technical ability might "plug in" usefully. With films, for example, one source of creative inflow from outside the technical world of film-making is in screenwriting.

Veerrrry interesting, and great to see from outside. Hmm.

So, some general responses...

1) Yeah, the time constraints we were under very much affected the process we went through. Hopefully, though, some of the key things you observed and that I have seen in regular use by experienced designers included

- a focus on underlying simulation, arriving a model of what to represent
- a ruthlessness about testing and then discarding approaches
- strong emphasis on iteration of prototypes

2) there's little doubt that much game design tends to be heavily conservative and derivative. Applying known models to a given simulation, rather than inventing a new model, is the default. In general, I have found that successful designers, despite all the artsyness ascribed to many of them, tend to be very practical about their craft.

3) that said, designers are also exactly where that greater diversity in creative inflow happens. Top designers are omnivorous readers with diverse educational backgrounds, intensely curious about a wide array of fields, and frequently reference those other fields in their work.

In the prototype we did there, we basically applied a classic game model of limited information to a collaborative challenge, in order to monitor information flow through communication-limited affinity groups, in order to represent a disaster scenario. So a marriage of game theory, game design theory, information theory, plus the desired research project on social dynamics...

10.

Timothy -
At what point is transparency enough? CCP is one of the most open and responsive MMO developers out there already.

There's a lot of misunderstanding that has helped create the whole thing, but at this point, there's no amount of transparency that will actually satisfy everyone.

11.

Ok. The ticket cost $1 but for access the toilet cost $25 and the pop-corn $10.

Hmmm....transparency....satisfying everyone...well, why don't you simply start by satisfying the truth and the players ? Could be quite enough , you know . Happy players= wealthy company. Or maybe i just confuse players with custommers .....sure, could be, shit happends .

12.

You know, Daniel, i'm very sad for all that mess.I do appreciate very much your work and i feel respect and simpathy for many of your " doings " there , also for your constructive attitude. I hope you wont take my posts personally. Afterall, this is just a blog and EVE is just a game . Virtual stuff.

13.

Timothy Burke>Now, mind you, before Richard pops up to point out that they're not governments but gods, they're sovereignties who have powers and capacities that don't exist in the real world.

That makes them gods.

>So with the EVE Online live management team, we've really got a problem that's best understood in terms of a relationship between citizens and sovereigns.

No, it's best understood in terms of a relationship between people and gods. The guilds are the sovereigns of the areas they control; neither they nor the rest of the player populace can do anything within the context of their virtual world to affect the gods.

Richard

14.

The game pays the mortgages and bills of around 150+ employees. It's pretty easy to take the attitude that "It's just a game", and forget that, assuming that they all work on the game in their spare time.

15.

The heroine dealers have to support their families and to pay mortgages too.Also they have to pay bribes . Pretty easy to put them in jail, eh ? Saying that " are just criminals ".

16.

do you have an ideea how much cost a good Kalashnikow these days ? Eh ? You know how costly and time consumming is to train a good m8 ? Eh ? You know how many decent nice innocent children and women depend on the icomes from heroine ? Eh ?
Have you any ideea how high designing skills are required in order to set a successfull " operation" ? Pretty easy....

17.

Tim: It seems to me that everyone interested in this field would benefit if a future synthetic world project included from its initial stages some kind of process of introspective, narrativized documentation of its own development.

This strikes me as a good place for a workplace ethnography. So much of what's done is more or less tacit, and the ability to do 'soup-to-nuts' design and journal it is difficult to say the least. There are also confidentiality concerns and the like, but those could be ironed out, I suspect.

I wonder if there's a way to get a grad student to intern in such a position for a year or two, and to report on the actual, as opposed to putative, design process.

18.

Hey.

One of the problems eve has is that this 'magic circle' thing (Assuming I'm understanding them term right reading Huizinga here as the boundry between the game and the real) is awfully blury at times with this game, and often somewhat asymetrically. Roleplayer gamers will have different relationships with the edges to non roleplayers , and so on.

Thing is, with eve, folks seem to get for real mad at each other alot.

Furthermore CCP seems to almost actively encourage meta-gaming, in terms of out of game espionage, forum warrior shenanigans and so on. When it was revealed that Band of Brothers where using Teamspeak spys to preempt ASCN's combat manouvers (And honestly, who wasnt), the community as a general rule thought it was clever by half and CCP noted they didnt see a problem with it.

And that's fine. The drama and performance it generates in eve is epic. Epic that in game events, like the big heists and what not hit the newspapers as journos breathlessly report the amazing turns of events in the game as if reporting on Star war's rebel alliance itself.

Now with that magic circle so messed up at the boundries, theres always going to be an excess of meaning production going on. Its contraversial. Deviant even. And for the most part eve players love it.

But with any border meaning production, theres a really really dangerous element in terms of commerce.

CCP likes that excess of meaning for its players, because it builds drama. CCP would do well to stay the fuck away from it itself however. Because when ITS reality gets blurred, then the prime accusation starts to show its flesh.

That in game alliances have been playing "In god mode".

The accusation , repeated multiply, and possibly with a degree of justification, is that CCP have provided material assistance in and out of game to BOB not available to other players. In the earlier case, via a GM spawning super-loot (T2 blueprints) for free for BOB, and generally being corrupt as heck [that allegation was kinda proven], and the more recent one appears to be to be a mess of allegations regarding the alleged (Note that a word!) retrenchment of a GM who was apparently disobeying BOB, and apparent out of game assistance to BOB members regarding the petition system. I have no idea about the truth behind the recent ones, except I know the accuser is sincere. Conspiracy mode? Possibly. A deliberate sabotage. No. You dont coordinate 3 or 4 alliances with thousands of players in a secret corporate griefing without someone catching wind.

A couple of observations arise here.

First off CCP handled this appalingly. Threatening to sue one of the alliances for, uh, something , was wildly stupid and pigheaded. Bad words on the internet? Game company meet american team and its first ammendment, first ammendement meet game company. A judge aint gunna even schedule a hearing. This was at core a SLAPP threat and a somewhat shameful one to make. And dumb as hell against an alliance run by a pair of articled lawyers. Was CCP in a bit of a panic here? Sure. So was the game alliance. Go talk about it over a beer and find a solution children. Truth be told , its all rather banal, and no one really came out peachy on this one.

But on a different level, a more interesting problem is that CCP really needs to understand the process of meaning production going on here.

I'll continue in another post...

19.

Ok. Lets look at a few pieces of the puzzle here.

1) In game/out of game. Its blurred as hell in eve. Actions such as forum spying and teamspeak espionage are considered part and parcel of the game.

2) Where theres categorical ambiguity, you find excesses of meaning production. Things exist here that dont fit into orderly categorys and they will be percieved as variously interesting, scandalous, immoral, ingenious, and so on. This is a pretty well understood process, in sexuality studies and whatnot, and I suggest the same heuristic applies here.

3) A general expectation that "God" shall not intervene divinely against the mortals without fair and avaliable processes. Its pretty much expected by the player base that GMs wont take sides in the affairs of its players.

4) The players have no such obligation. This is an almost entirely PvP game. And a bloodthirsty one at that. Alliances are not trying to 'defeat' each other in happy little set piece battles. They are out to annihilate each other. As one player put it, "Eve alliances are not imperialists, they are genocidal expansionists". A BOB diplomat once claimed they try and grief other teams into quitting the game. In fairness, its precisely the same claim its enemys make as well.

5) CCP quite actively (and here is where the problems arise) states its policy that GMs and DEVs should play, covertly , in these alliances as players to "get a feel" for the game, basically for R&D purposes.

Now lets look at how these factors interact.

First off, 5 is deeply problematic in conjunction with 3 and 4. When the line between player ('mortal' and 'biased') and DEV ('god' ergo 'unbiased') is deliberately blurred, people start to question what sort of unholy meanings to derive out of this. Biased gods? Immortal Players? What does one do to fight this? Petition it? What if your enemy is reading your complaints and dismissing them? How does the player know its not the case?

Furthermore, this is then made somewhat ugly when combined with 1 & 2.

You have God-mode players (conceptually) straddling the shifting categorys between in-game and out-of-game. When a BOB alliance leader admits discussing in-game concerns with a lead developer over MSN, what MAY be just a simple friendly discussion turns into the direct line to God bypassing the usual routines of Catholic confession past Mary and Jesus. A Direct line to the infinite whilst the enemy has to put up with a drunken priest issuing hail marys and boring sermons.

And the reaction to this is going to be as categorically confused as well. In game worrys about game balance turn into vast out of game conspiracys (Of course they wont balance the titan! Band-of-developers relys on them! If *WE* get a titan, it'll be nerfed in a flash!) and so on. Where does the game end, and the hurtful allegation of corporate misconduct begin?

The solutions not entirely easy, but I believe I've mapped here the geometry of its symbolism.

1) Actively discourage the meta-game. CCP puts a policy forbidding out of game spying , hacking, and so on. Put in mechanisms for IN GAME espionage (For instance the ability to 'crack' in game communication channels, etc. use some imagination here). The magic circle should hold as a clear line in the sand. It really is just a game, and reminding players that hating on humans outside it is really not cool. Keep the roleplay a role thats played, not a lifestyle.

2) For god sake , LISTEN, dont THREATEN, when the players say they are deeply unhappy with CCP staff playing 0.0 politics in player teams. This has been the well all this shitty drama has sprung from, and CCPs refusal to see it as a problem, instead offering the solution of "We wont tell you we are here" (which is bloody stupid. Keep us in the dark and ask us not to be paranoid? aaaaaah!) For serious, if you want GMs and Devs on the battlefield, stick them in polaris frigs marked "GM_Gamedude" and watch, ask quesations, and be clearly NOT a player. And dont be unclearly a player either. Its frankly nonsense that CCP cant develop the game unless they are shooting other players in vastly overpowered supercaps. Players consider this deeply unfair and scary, and CCP needs to acknowledge this.

Both of these suggestions are about reestablishing clear categorys that players can understand and feel safe about. They are NOT hard, and will be percieved by players as signs of good faith.

Angry mechanations by mysterious occult gods might scare the vilagers into submission, but the villagers have the option of migrating to other lands where the happy buddha offers universal suffrage and good fortunes far away where your terrible powers hold no sway.

20.

Are you asking Wolfowitz to fire his own whore ?!

21.

Amarilla>You know how many decent nice innocent children and women depend on the icomes from heroine ? Eh ?

You mean heroin or heroines?

Richard

22.

@dmx: That's pretty much the most illuminating analysis of EvE that I (a non-EvE player) have ever read. Bravo.

23.

>dmx

Excellent description! However, I think it is worth pointing out that this best describes the hard-core alliance game. In fact there is a very large diversity of play going on.

I don't have numbers (and if any of you do, please post), but I'd guess most players still "reside" in relative safety of empire space where they tend to indulge in more benign struggles. Having said that, everything is interconnected and all players become aware at some point that what they do and who they sell to and assist ultimately (though perhaps through many layers of indirection) has a connection to the alliance struggles.

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