Terra Nova

PvP, asymmetry, and the information game in Eve-Online

Player-versus-Player (PvP) games do not have to be balanced.  By "balanced" I narrowly speak to the perspective and interaction of a small number of individuals or groups of players.  If they are not balanced they can instead provide venues to allow players to engage indirectly and level the playing field.  In stone-paper-scissors stone bests scissors but paper sneaks up, so scissors says to paper "Dude - let's be allies?"

Another misconception might be this.  If *multiplayer* PvP games require more skill than PvE (Player-versus-Environment) games, then it must follow it is about twitch (eye-hand coordination). This might be more true for arena games (though not entirely - as teamwork can count).  It is less true for MMOGs where large numbers of players and their apparent need for outcomes to be independent of network latency has meant that when two parties hit the "WHACK YOU" button, all things being equal, the outcome is designed to be largely out of your control. 

Choices that come before and after hitting the "WHACK YOU" button provide whatever skill differentiator there is.

Eve-Online is a complicated place.  The previous posts in this series sugggest this (NBSI and the grey problem, Scarcely rare, My friend’s keeper, The moon is a harsh mistress).  However, what may not be apparent to most readers is that with Eve-Online's complexity comes opportunity for asymmetric exploits that can convert unbalanced relationships into more balanced ones.  And it seems to me that such are critical in making the game world seem fair.

What to Call a Griefer?

It used to be that the term griefer had a very specific meaning in virtual worlds: it meant someone who deliberately did something for the pleasure in knowing it caused others pain.

What does it mean nowadays, though?

Residents no longer own Second Life?

Ever since I can remember the home page of Second Life’s web site has said the same thing:

“Second Life is a 3D online digital world imagined, created and owned by its residents”

Then suddenly – it changed to this:

“Second Life is a 3D online digital world imagined and created by its residents”

So, no longer owned by Residents then?

A Case Study of Second Life

Innovations is a relatively new journal from MIT Press edited by Philip E. Auerswald and Iqbal Z. Quadir, and it focuses on technology and governance (two frequent topics here), with a specific focus on their policy implications. A regular component of the periodical is the presentation of cases by innovators themselves, accompanied by critical commentaries. The latest issue includes a case study of Second Life by our own Cory Ondrejka, with commentaries by Philip Evans of The Boston Consulting Group, Paul R. Verkuil of the Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, and, well, me. A bit more below the fold; dig in and comment, if you like.

Research potential of virtual worlds: what environment for what methodology?

Science Mag has an article entitled "The Scientific Research Potential of Virtual Worlds" by William Sims Bainbridge which gives a pretty good overview of how games such as MMO have a "great potential as sites for research in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences, as well as in human-centered computer science.

Virtual Law Update

There has been a lot of activity on the virtual worlds and law front.  So in lieu of several posts, here are some bullet points:

Habbo Hotel as a boundary object

There is an insightful interview of Sulka Haro, the lead designer of Habbo Hotel by Brandon Sheffield on Gamasutra. The interview covers a broad range of issues and may be of interest for who-ever is intrigued by "gameless games" or the "social web" or the evolution of the game industry as a whole. It's not all about MMOs but it shows how the topic overlaps with other themes such as social software, multiple on-line identity or scrum development etc.

The moon is a harsh mistress

Player-versus-Player (PvP) games mean winners and losers.  Player-versus-Environment (PvE) games means you might whack trolls and no-one else is for the poorer.  PvP means you whack a troll and some other player is playing that troll.  PvP can also be subtle, e.g. economic competition:  you are trying to out-market someone else.  Etc.

In many ways, I think, how a game world handles the losers says more about it and its participants than how it handles the winners.  If a game system can tolerate more losers (not scare them off) it can more richly reward the winners.  Yet, to have winners a PvP game must be able to recycle its losers.  If the losers feel like they are only serving as the redshirts to the fantasy of a few yellow-shirts (fn1) they will leave.

With most online arena games the price of failure is minimal.  Often, it seems that the hint of the possibility of winning on the next go and perhaps a bit of smack-talk is all that is required to keep players coming back.  In starker PvP games like Eve-Online, where losses can be horrific (e.g. player months of time investment can be lost easily in a single battle), the problem is compounded.  Consider just one weekend campaign involving a thousand ships, say 500 winners and 500 losers.  Ignoring that winners lose gear - try telling 500 participants in any other casual social organization that their efforts over the last N weeks or months has just evaporated.

Eve-Online seems to not only have been able to recycle its losers, it has built an ecosystem to nurture them for another day.  In its own way I think this speaks some to the ways social systems under stress can be resilient.

VWs Arrive II.1 - Writer's Guild

Although one could view it cynically as an effort to extend their reach, the Writer's Guild of America has announced their first videogame writing awards will be presented next February. If nothing else, this is an indication that it's a sufficiently significant portion of today's new literature that the guild wants a piece of the action. We'll have to see how VWs fare among other videogames.

(Also see Google News, Kotaku, GamerNode, and joystiq.)

The Hidden Bartle Type

Often when I write about games, I'm interested in an experiential perspective on play and in the kinds of social and political structures that evolve within virutal worlds, but TN readers probably have noticed that I'm equally drawn to questions about design processes, about the authorship of digital games.

VWs Arrive II - Toyota/WoW Commercial

Just because everybody else seems to be talking about it...

You know virtual worlds have arrived when...

There is now a customizable digital Barbie that connects (with included cradle?) to a virtual world - 'a next-generation fashion doll and stylish MP3 player all in one'.  You need the device to connect to the world, but once there can create a room, shop, and do other typical social VW stuff (all with parentally controlled permission settings).  From Amazon (who are suggesting I buy one):

The hottest toy of the season is finally here! The interactive Barbie Girls let you do more with Barbie than ever before! At www.BarbieGirls.com, girls can create their own, personalized online space--everything from designing a "room" to creating a character--where they can then play games, chat with gal pals, watch videos and even shop with earned virtual money. They even play MP3's! Parents will appreciate extras such as word filters, moderation tools and other safety features to ensure that the virtual world stays friendly and fun for all visitors. Barbie Girls are the newest, coolest way to play.

Apparently the site has been up since April, but this is this first I've heard of it... anyone else got kids obsessed with Webkinz?  Mine calls hers Websky.

Check out the video...

Lighting US bulbs

Being a net leech on TN I thought I’d ask the Hive Mind another question.

I’m running a workshop at Virtual Worlds in San Jose on Wed at 13:00 – 14:00. The workshop is part of my larger project to engage industry, academia and governments in discussions about virtual worlds and public policy. This all falls under the umbrella of the think tank The Virtual Policy Network that I’m gradually giving life to.

The challenge here is: what topics / angles that fall broadly into the arena of public policy and fit within the context of the US debate would a crowd primarily interested in commercial / serious uses of virtual worlds be interested in?

The Future of the Book is...Second Life?

Daniel Terdiman, long time FoTN, has a new book and blog out. Which apart from me wanting to plug, led to think about the amazing weight of books that are emerging about virtual worlds and especially Second Life. Looking at the Amazon pre-order page for Daniel's book discloses no less than 16 books on how to [(make money from), (understand), (have sex in), (generally deal with)] Second Life. You know that something is significant when the "Dummies Guide To Second Life" comes out. And a quick search for "virtual worlds" on Amazon brings up a metric assload of books, some of which actually look quite interesting (and some of them are not about Second Life, amazingly).

Rules v. Fiction

I'm currently re-reading a bit of Jesper Juul's book, Half-Real.  I should say at the outset that I haved always enjoyed Juul's general approach to videogame studies.  His work is highly accessible, innovative, thoughtful, and centered on concrete (and popular) examples.  (He also includes lots of screenshots, which is good.)  Juul takes what might be called a "grassroots" approach to game studies, not bringing heavy disciplinary baggage to colonize the area, but instead trying to build a formal theory of games from the ground up.  He takes his lead primarily from game and culture theorists like Huizinga, Caillois, Crawford and Sutton-Smith rather than from literary theory or media studies.

But I don't want to review Half-Real here -- I just want to share a passage that made me wonder a bit about the differences between MMORPGs and other games.  The question is: how do players set the balance in MMORPGs between world immersion and game/rule objectives?

IJRP

One of the many announcements made at the Tokyo Game Show a week or so ago concerned a new, peer-reviewed journal that might be of interest to some of TerraNova's readers. The International Journal of Role-Playing is "a biannual international journal that covers all aspects of role-playing, irrespective of the medium, platform or intent". It differs from other journals in that it treats role-playing with respect, rather than as some psychological aberration brought on by too little exposure to human beings and sunlight. You should be able to get quality work published here that elsewhere might be looked down on for being, you know, to do with games...

The editorial board is made up of some of the most highly-respected people working in the area, plus me.

Richard

Video games as research tools in psychology

Being a researcher interested in the user experience of interactive technologies, I have always been following how video games are employed as a platform to explore certain topics and practices, especially in social sciences/psychology. The use of such kind of platform has already been discussed in the human computer interaction field for a long time. In psychology, especially, you have papers from 1995 about "Video games as research tools" by Donchin or some statements by HCI researchers (like Holmquist in "The right kind of challenge").

Second Life Indicator Contracts (SLICs)

The Iowa Electronic Markets and Tradesports.com allow people to trade contracts that pay off based on the outcome of the 2008 US presidential campaign.  Prices in these 'prediction markets' appear to be superior to traditional polls.  This superiority is consistent with economic theory, because traders' price influence is tied to their trading aggressiveness, which in turn reflects their confidence.  As long traders' confidence is tied closely enough to the quality of their information, prices in prediction markets will be superior to an equally-weighted average of people’s beliefs.

In this post, I throw down the gauntlet to those running (or considering running) a trading exchange in Second Life—create a 'Second Life Indicator Contract' (SLIC) that would predict the future user base or economic activity in Second Life.

Arden Slows Down, Takes Breather

Arden: The World of William Shakespeare ended a year of development yesterday, closing with a stress test. (Many thanks to our alpha testers!)  Unfortunately, that might be the last bit of news from Arden for a long time. We have come to the end of our funding, and while we are still working, I'm not sure when we will have anything worth reporting.

Virtual space evolution according to Korean developer Jake Song

Last month, I had the pleasure to co-organize a small event in Seoul about digital and physical space, and how technologies reshape them. One of the speaker, Jake Song gave an interesting talk about the evolution of "virtual space" in multi-player games. A South Korean programmer, regarded as one of the greatest game developers in Korea, Jake is one the of the creator of Lineage and is now CEO of XL Games.

October Guest Nicolas Nova

We're very excited to welcome Nicolas Nova to Terra Nova as a guest author for the month of October.  Nicolas is a cognitive scientist by training and works as a research scientist at the Media and Design Lab (Swiss Institute of Technology, EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland and as a user experience and foresight researcher for IT and video-game companies.

This is Your Brain on WoW

A recent article in The Age entitled Ethical Dilemmas canvassed the question of the ethical obligations of game designers to players. According to the piece, Jonathan Blow, the designer of Braid, claims that the grind of MMORPGs is unethical:

Mr Blow believes developers need to think about what their games are teaching players when they reward them for performing certain actions.

"That kind of reward system is very easily turned into a Pavlovian or Skinnerian scheme," he says. "It's considered best practice: schedule rewards for your player so that they don't get bored and give up on your game. That's actually exploitation."

...

"I think a lot of modern game design is actually unethical, especially massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, because they are predicated on player exploitation," Mr Blow says