Terra Nova

Rift: Coin Locks

Many years ago, I overheard someone at GDC say "Online games are big database transaction systems. Big banks." Last night I logged into Rift for the first time and saw the Coin Lock symbol. Your account becomes coin locked any time you log in from a new place, or haven't logged in for some time, or when they reset all the locks in the game. If your account is coin locked, nothing in it can be destroyed or transferred. You are unable to conduct any economic transaction. To unlock the account, press a button and an authorization code is sent to your email address. It's just like a bank security code system, in other words.

Rift's Coin Locks are a tidy way to enhance account security and increase the business costs of hackers, pirates, and gold farmers. Well done!

BioWare and the "Straight Male Gamer"

Some game forum threads are destined to become classics, enshrined in the annals of epic winningness. That's the case, I think, for the recent BioWare thread on the topic of the "straight male gamer."

The OP in the thread (who had apparently posted on this topic several times, in hopes that he would receive support for his views), was voicing his outrage over the fact that Dragon Age 2 allows romance to occur between any two players, rather than enforcing heterosexual norms. The centerpiece of his argument is that "straight male gamers" make up the vast majority of players, and their needs should therefore dictate the game's design.

Mass Queens and the Clarity of Game Mechanics

Posting on behalf of former TN guest author Mark Wallace

 

One question I've been pondering as I go about designing a strategy game is that of clarity in game mechanics, and in combat systems in particular. Committed players of strategy games (and many other genres, for that matter) have long taken joy in pulling apart the math behind the combat resolution systems that drive the games they play, in part to seek an advantage or upper hand and in part out of simple fascination. This description of the mass queen experiment from the StarCraft2 Hacks blog is a great example. It runs through a bunch of math, based on things like minerals, gas, queens, hatcheries, food, game time, energy, "transfuses," injections and more, and comes to the colorful but perhaps surprising conclusion that "Queens are better cost effective healers than Medivacs." Food for thought.

People Who Live in Glass Houses...

...are on the internets ALL THE TIME! At least, according to this video from Corning, makers of lots of glass. It is such a cool ad. Every surface a touchscreen. Imagine! Yet dystopia lurks behind the smiles. Choose your flavor: persistent surveillance, relationship madness, unavoidable work, lack of silence, fragmented consciousness, information overload. And the ad shows no avatars (well maybe one if you count the shopping), no games, and no porn. Just happy families getting timely information from lidup to liddown. Yeah, that's how it will be.

Ninjas, data and my start-up

Ted tells me it's not shameless self-promotion if it's also interesting, so here goes nothing. After working on the EQII data set for the past 4 years and generating a lot of research, a few of us on the effort decided to think about commericalizing what we'd learned and thought about along the way. Our effort, Ninja Metrics, debuted at GDC last week and is now working with several companies.

We've developed a series of tools, dashboards and analysis engines to automate the study of large volumes of data. Our coolest tool by far is one that measures social influence and places a dollar value on it. I think it's a big deal. Links, descriptions, gizmos and more below the fold.

Job Posting: Bioware Director of Analytics

Maybe a little unorthodox for TN, but a colleague at Bioware Austin asked me to post this ad and I'm betting someone who reads here is a potentially good fit, or knows someone.

Also, I happen to love analytics (post on the same to follow), and I'd like to see a smart person get this job. I like that the games industry is starting to take data and analyis more seriously. Plus, I mean really, it's dragons and Jedis . . .

Interested folks can find the posting below at jobs.ea.com or look up Craig Fryar at Bioware and ask him for the 411.

English Zynga Case: property but not theft?

I’ve been trying to get as close to source as I can in the case of the ‘theft’ of virtual poker chips. According to a local news paper court report the chargers were in fact:

• converting criminal property – 4 counts
• unauthorised access to a computer with intent to commit an offence – 1 count

41 other offences were taken into consideration.

So, he was not charged with theft.

But, it is certainly the first time I’ve heard of ‘converting criminal property’ being applied in an English case relating to virtual items of this type.

The case is No. T20100391 at Exeter Crown Court should anyone have access to relevant listings, failing that I'll update when the summary is up on The Law Pages.

What Really Worries Game Designers: GDC 2011 Closing Commentary

This report comes from Travis Ross.

As I walked around GDC this week I was hard not to feel the power of the FTP/Microtransaction business model. Yes, companies like Intel, Sony, Crytek, and Ubisoft dominated the expo floor, but companies like Zynga and Playdom pushing behavioral metrics like ARPU, DAU, engagement, and retention seemed to dominate the discussion. Theories from behavioral economics and psychology along with multivariate testing are being applied and flouted as means to improve metrics, and design –  to some extent – seems to be driven by metrics.

From these metrics and methods a dichotomy of industry professionals seems to have emerged. On one side are individuals who embrace the model of micro-transactions and metrics as a way to increase revenue and be successful. On the other are those who are concerned that these methods will lead them to making slightly more complicated slot machines. These are the professionals  concerned with ethics and the suppression of creativity. For my last talk of GDC I attended a round-table discussion on monetization in games based around microtransactions. Two of the points discussed “What are you most paranoid about with this business model.” and “Where is the social games industry headed?” lead to animated and impassioned discussion about the ethics and creativity of game design.

RMT is actually bad

Some years ago I argued against RMT. I published a paper in which RMT was described as a scourge, a blight upon game systems.

Analysts from the game industry have studiously addressed this issue from within, concerned as ever with providing their players with a superior experience. Even CCP, the most libertarian of developers, now engages in open war against the gold farmers. Since March 2009 (judging from Ajo's talk today), CCP has attacked RMT with a vengeance.

It makes sense. RMT is associated with degraded user experience (my original claim), credit card fraud, account hacking, and excessive CPU/user metrics. Playing the game for reasons other than game play are destructive. It harms other users. There's a good ground in policy for regulating RMT, and I am glad that CCP, with the Flak-88 of statistical power it now commands, has turned it reticule on this nasty problem.

 

Roman Catholic, thank you

How utterly bizarre that so many discussions should revolve around one's confession. Yet I find it is so.

Valve does psychometrics

Mike Ambinder of Valve spoke about using skin conductance and muscle movement to track player arousal and valence. One experiment had a timer counting down more quickly as the player gets more aroused. Stay calm to win! But since arousal is typically a good thing, I wondered why they didn't do this in Berserker mode. The more aroused you get, the more damage you do. RAWR!

GDC: Revenue Drives Research

From several of the talks, it seems game companies, driven by revenues, are collecting data on a massive scale and using it to conduct predictive studies about player data. The method of designing by datastream seems well advanced, although some techniques are more advanced than others. Dmitri Williams seems to have his finger on the pulse, and Raph Koster, the father-doctor of designers, remains as cerebral as ever. Most exciting to me is evidence that companies are using shards to do experiments. That's big stuff, science-wise.

Blogging from GDC: Consalvo

Travis Ross and I are visiting GDC this week. We'll be blogging about innovations in games from a social science-y perspective, with special focus on economics and politics.

To kick things off, let's take note of Mia Consalvo's talk on social game mechanics; she's measuring the communication techniques that social games are using to motivate players and keep them playing. Gee I wonder if anyone in the industry might be interested in her findings...

There's some stuff about gamification out there, but it is not very impressive. Hype warning.

However, one useful thing to note is that game designers have realized that the real world can be part of their game a la ARG. Meanwhile businesses are taking advantage of the motivational techniques that games are using. The businesses seem less concerned about building games and more interested in how games can solve real world problems. One problem that someone from a website called ModCloth presented was a coordination problem where they allowed individuals to use the social web to vote on what clothing would get produced on a large scale. So the player community was collaborating and using social network mechanics to engage in politics for the clothing that they liked. It is cool how Modcloth has designed their business model around these communities and how the communities allow them to solve a coordiation problem and reinvent fashion as a bottom up political process.

More soon, and for related cool stuff, see Travis' blog Motivate. Play.