Terra Nova

Do you build a game like a machine?

Who should make games - artists or engineers? We've bemoaned in this space before the turn that WoW took, from the kludgy 3d mock-up of a D&D campaign that was EverQuest, to the very refined, very polished, and to some dead, grind that was (is!) Azeroth. We bemoaned it. Then we went out and played the heck out of it for years.

Students come to game design with passion and see themselves as creators. It's a lot of work to get them to finish, polish, and refine to a degree the industry might respect. It's important pressure, though, according to a surprising source. Ernest Adams, a game design artist, tells us that passion is overrated.

Constructing these large-scale engagement systems - is there a method to it? Is it scientific, like the building of ships and cars? Come to think of it, what's an example of an "indie car" or an "indie ship" or an "indie building" akin to the indie games that many say are the only soul left in the business? Are these examples apt at all?

Goonswarm Shocks EVE Markets

More evidence that an MMO can look like the real world! Compare the Enron saga to the following story sent in by Goonswarmer endie. Thanks endie!

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Basically, this is about some emergent gameplay that we in Goonswarm (it's always Goonswarm) are running right now.  It requires a touch of background for the non-Eve player, but is fairly easily comprehensible to the non-Eve constituency.  There are three basic things to understand:

1- In Eve, "POS Towers" (essentially small space stations) are at the core of much manufacturing, being used to react various compounds to make the building blocks of advanced construction.  Of the four Eve races' towers, by far the most efficient for this task are Gallente.  Gallente towers are thus used almost exclusively for high-end compound reactions.  Without the results of these reactions - many essential items from interdictors to jump freighters - simply cannot be built.

2 - Gallente towers use a specific type of ice which is predominately mined in Gallente empire space (it spawns in a few other places but is economically unrewarding to mine there until prices become vastly higher).  By filtering on various criteria, we were able to determine that only seventeen of all of Eve's thousands of systems were suitable for the methods used to mine almost all Gallente ice (automated botting by large numbers of ice-mining accounts).  I'll spare you the details of what those criteria were unless you are particularly interested.

3 - The automated bots use ships that themselves require at least thirty or so hours of mining to pay for their own capital investment, when fitted.  Ironically, they rely on CCP's own mechanics for protection: if you shoot them in empire space then "Concord" (an external, invincible force of NPCs: essentially town guards) will spawn very quickly and destroy you.  However, it is possible to fit certain ships so as to deal sufficient damage sufficiently rapidly to destroy one or more miners before Concord arrive.  For obvious and predictably tasteless Goonswarm-cultural reasons this is known as Jihading.

We have therefore announced and begun a campaign aimed at preventing anyone mining for Gallente ice in Empire space.  Since we have thousands of members, we have proved able to shut ice-mining operations down almost entirely.

GDC Online Coverage

Our friends the psychogamers are covering GDC Online over on Motivate.Play. Can't wait to hear what Neal Stephenson has been up to.

Minecraft as Web 2.0

I was recently invited to write a book chapter about the intersection of amateur creativity and digital games. I just posted a draft of that chapter here. It's half about Web 2.0 and half about Minecraft.  Feedback is welcome.

I have been interested in amateur creativity for over a decade now and it has been one of the things I have found most interesting in studying virtual worlds.  As I explain in the draft, I think digital gaming is itself interesting because it is intrinsically aligned with solicitude for a certain group of creative amateurs (players).  So I've been fascinated following the phenomenon of Minecraft and how it works as both a tool for creativity, a game, and a locus for other forms of creativity.  I'm going to keep watching to see how it evolves.  So if anyone reading is doing academic research on Minecraft--or knows of anyone else who is--please let me know.

Minecraft is set up like an adventure game, but unlike in World of Warcraft, you're not on a roller coaster ride to level 85.  Instead, Minecraft embodies what I once wanted Second Life to be.  Second Life is supposedly all about user creativity, but it seem that many users don't take much advantage of the creative tools it offers. In Minecraft, though, user creativity is baked into the gameplay.  That makes it a more satisfying experience for amateur creators.  Not to knock Second Life, but based on the numbers, it seems that many people (I'm curious about how many are kids, btw) are finding Minecraft's sandbox more fun than the sandbox of Second Life.

As I explain in the draft, I'm not sure what Minecraft says about the future of user-generated content in games.  I imagine the industry is paying attention to Minecraft and how it became what it is.  But I'm not sure the mainstream games industry is anywhere near ready to create a Minecraft clone, for reasons I discuss in the paper and in this prior paper.

I don't imagine it is going to happen, but a massively-multiplayer version of Minecraft would be really interesting, wouldn't it?  Especially if it allowed some sort of client-level code-modding as you moved through regions, so groups of users could add new layers of functionality to their spaces. I wonder what sorts of things would emerge from that?

Back to Ontology

Happy Monday, world! Let's do some philosophy!! Correspondent Freek Rijna has sent us a monograph applying Searle's concepts of social construction of reality to the ontology of virtual items. There's a nice, tight little point in here: Virtual things are real simulations. Simulations are real things, after all. They have physical existence as images and sounds. If you accept this, you don't have to get bogged down in debates about whether virtual things are real or not real. Look at it this way: A rook in chess is a real simulation of a castle. It takes its place among the set of real things labeled {simulations}, not among the set of real things labeled {buildings}. Therefore, asking whether a rook is a real castle is like asking whether a fish is a real bicycle. The fish and the bicycle are both real. And the construction "a fish may NOT be a real bicycle" is not very interesting at all.And so when people buy and sell virtual items, they are not doing so as if those items were real. Rather, they are treating them as the real things they are - real simulations.