Holy hellions, Batman, 2012 is off with a bang.
Too bad about SWTOR and the LEGO Universe, but Guild Wars 2 might actually ship this year, and there are some other exciting things brewing. Tera Online might emerge unscathed from its legal machinations and make its promised launch date of May 2012. Blizzard is making a 'casual' MMO (with product placements)...
But here's what I'm waiting for...
The Secret World (April 2012) - This one is exciting even among the 'I'm not an MMO person' crowd. To me, it's like the game I've been waiting for. Here's why:
Want more? Check out the initial announcements at PAX 2009, or more recent trailers and interviews. Register for the beta, if you haven't already. Watch out for the government.
Also, don't forget that DiGRA (the Digital Games Research Association) is holding its semi annual conference in Tampere, Finland (where all the very cool kids are). They need papers and reviewers, so get in touch!
In terms of the audience he's addressing, I pretty much agree with everything he says. Gamification in this sense is just the latest conceptual hook that allows marketing executives and business experts to convince their paymasters that they're up-to-date and innovative. ("Innovation", ironically, was last year's gamification.)
It isn't just marketing people, of course. When the talk turns to serious games or games + learning, a similar move is often visible. The people drawn to gamification in this sense are drawn to it because it makes them look like they're doing something to improve their yields, reach the unreached, learn that last stubborn group of the unlearned, mobilize the unmotivated. Gamification here is both alibi and life-preserver. It explains why there is something still to be done (we haven't used games! which is why people don't buy our stuff/take their medicine/learn their math/smash the state!) and why you should keep the gamifier in the picture. (Do you know how to make a game, Mr. CEO/university president/non-profit manager/Marxist theorist?)
But these are waves that wash up on the beach. When the tide recedes, the sand is still there.
What's the sand of gamification? What will be left when this too has passed like the once-universal faith that we would all one day live and work in Second Life?
Ha, got your attention, eh? But this is actually an important topic, of the 'reality is broken' variety. Like the fact that we're obsessed over sexting and other digital phenomena related to sex, yet we have done little to improve sex education in this country. In fact, we have vilified and cut funding to Planned Parenthood and other organizations that save people's lives by providing them critical information that affects them physically, emotionally, spiritually. I ranted about this on Quora recently:
Sexting isn't the issue. The lack of good, ongoing and honest sex education and support (from elementary school) is. I personally don't care what kids do in this regard, as long as they are well-informed and not succumbing to pressure from peers or romantic partners. And obviously this behavior is probably not appropriate in classrooms.
As an anthropologist, I will tell you that sex play in early pubescence and later is very, very normal, and in some cultures, very well tolerated with positive effect. We are extremely backwards in our proclivity to bury our heads in the sands.
I do, however, think all kids need to be educated on the potential ramifications of having a digital trail of activity like this, and what it can mean in terms of reputation (immediately) and career later. It's outrageous that kids learn most of what they know about sex from each other, tv/movies and the Internet. This leaves gaping holes in their knowledge and their judgment about something that can affect their lives in such profound ways, and can even lead to illness and death.
I've been thinking for some time that games could play an important role in helping to eliminate a lot of the misinformation that is spread among kids and teens. Typically this sort of thing is handled a la the serious game: take some existing curriculum - the sort of thing you'd see in a high school sex ed class (if a school is lucky enough to have it). 'Chocolate-covered broccoli'. Seldom about the realities of sex and the social and emotional contexts that surround it. And boring.
One of my favorite sites is Ask Alice, a community effort from Columbia University that provides a forum for kids and teens to ask any question about sex, drugs, what have you, and get a truthful and reasonable answer. I think it's an incredible resource, but most people don't seem to know about it. So where are people getting their sexual educations?
I was really inspired by a TED Talk a lovely woman by the name of Cindy Gallop gave not long ago. You should watch it yourself, otherwise I might ruin it, but I will tell you that she makes some rather stunning points about how porn culture has distorted the way people think about sex. Clearly we need to figure out some better ways to communicate all of this, aside from ignoring the groundswell of sexual activity that is incredibly normal for our species.
There's rather a dearth of recreational, digital sex games, a fact that surprises me given the proclivity of clever porn mongers who hawk every kind of sex ware imaginable. Have throughout history, using any available technology. It's well established, for instance, that early photography and film thrived on sexual innovations. And we certainly spent a lot of time discussing the ins and outs of cybersex back in the day, when everything digital was a novelty. Are we jaded? Or recession economics?
Well, it seems like a business opportunity to me. They appear to sell plenty of books and board games in those novelty sex shops. People could certainly use some variety in their sex lives. Yet the ecosystem somehow manages to eschew innovation, just like the video game industry. Microsoft, for instance, is blocking sexual uses of their Kinect device, citing 'unintended puposes' (imagine a mash-up of a Kinect device and teledildonics - long distance love, FTW!). I did find A-Chat , but it seems like a graphics enhanced chat room app, and that's boring, too... I suppose there's the seedy underbelly that is Second Life's sex subculture, but it seems, well, seedy. And not terribly educational. But if people are into it, great. Let's just have some other options.
Most sex and videogames conjecture has been about either glorifying or bastardizing sexual content. There are few balanced perspectives: Brenda Braithwaite's work is very insightful, and Bonnie Ruberg has made quite a few contibutions, too. That's sort of not the point I'm trying to make, though. Sure, we could be more mature about sex and sexual imagery in games. But I sort of don't care about that stuff. I want us to ask, yet again, how can this incredible platform for persuasion be used for the greater good? How can we inform people, encourage safe play and experimentation... delight with escapism, encourage fantasy and role-playing... do all the things that we know video games are so good for?
So, brilliant Terra Novans... what games would you design to solve this problem?
Crisp Thinking announced today that its community management platform will be used by Jabble, a new children's social networking site. Says Crisp Thinking:
"The technology has an independently tested accuracy rating of 98.4 per cent by Cambridge University in the UK in the detection of online predators. It uses a combination of machine learning heuristics to detect long-term behaviours, concept analysis, filtering technology and reputation analysis to help keep children safe online. The Platform operates in multi-languages and ensures communities, social networks and online games remains COPPA compliant."
Inspired by Mark Chen's project summary and ensuing discussion, I have been thinking that we should collect on our collective experience and document some of the ways we achieve insight in an area as rapidly evolving as virtuality. In the associated comment thread, Richard and I discuss method, and I explain a lot more about participant observation and why it is sometimes ok to be subjective. We have also had more than a few discussions about method over the years.
That said, it's still a highly emergent and tricky area, with researchers and practioners inventing and reinventing methods on a constant basis. This, arguably, is a good thing.
In my MMO research I made a lot of methodological decisions based on technological parameters/ limitations (WoW, for instance, didn't have an easy way of collecting chats, yet City of Heroes did - critical to my method that I can collect qual data such as this, therefore it had to be CoH). What are the rules? Is it a spectrum inclusive of scholarly and commercial efforts accompanied by a range of expectations about what constitutes evidence, truth, and calls to action?
A lateral thought: I have also been pleasantly surprised to see more and more speculative ideas about virtual worlds, virtual life, the virtual sel(ves), etc. etc. etc. (even entire tv series). I appreciate the big picture perspective: what got us here, and where we might be going. I'm also involved in some projects that remind me how far we've come, and how much further we have to go.
Of course, history tells us that we tend to overestimate some of technology's impacts while simultaneously overlooking others (Alan Kay?). My role as an anthropologist encourages me to look around me and try to ascertain what aspects of our culture are likely to survive, to morph, what technologies are emerging, what sub-cultures will thrive, what people will care about, how they will play/work, how kinship and learning and philosophy change, or don't. Etc. Really not a lot of crystal ball gazing, just observation coupled with intuition and a deep embedding in the culture(s) in question. We even accept anecdotes in this 'verse.
My role as a futurist attempts to project what our world might look like within that context, or better yet, within some variations not even imagined, or imaginable. In a usability lab, I might take advantage of specfic data collection methods that prove a point in graphs and charts of what happened in that one session on that day. Extrapolation is, of course, possible, but not 100% accurate, once observer effects, natural vs artifical environments and longer term behaviors are evaluated. However, there are seeds of some possible future(s) in these observations. The question, ultimately, is what will stick, and what will fade. Or as an old friend called William Shakespeare said:
If you can look into the seeds of time and say, which grain will grow, and which will not, speak then to me.
Tricky business. 'If Union Pacific had realized they were in the transportation business, instead of the railroad business, we'd be flying on Union Pacific planes'. (someone said it). Decoupling technologies from cultural shifts is the first step in understanding. Or at least that's my opinion and my preferred approach, which is really only a variation in perspective, not better or worse than other approaches, but pieces of the puzzle.
Above I have commented on some of the methods I use in achieving a deeper understanding of virtuality. I know psychology, law, economics, education, cybernetics, cultural theory and communications have yet other perspectives, while commercial research's distance between, say, market research and observational player research, is often a cultural chasm that doesn't take advantage of those perspectives in symbiosis. Yet it achieves other things, so in combination with other approaches, it becomes a way of observing in details some facets of the overall possibility/problem space to be explored. Different types of data persuade different categories of stakeholders, eliciting the change(s) desired. A constellation of methods can better assure success (inspiring relevant change/innovation) in the distributed, interdisciplinary groups we work within.
Soon I will post a more thorough introduction to my preferred approaches, one of which is cyborg anthropology (if you just can't wait, you can buy the book or hear Amber Case explain it...). In the meantime, Marshall McLuhan:
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”
Of course, we kind of knew that already, but Yahtzee at Zero Punctuation touches on WoW's number-centric play brilliantly.
I've been playing Cataclysm almost every day since it's release last month (minus some traveling days). At first, the abundance of "new" kept me going for a long while. Now that I've hit a little slump, waiting for the guild to get enough toons to start raiding, I'm in that part of the cyle where I reflect on the play a little and wonder why I was so sucked in. I think for me it was seeing everything there is to see, flying around in (new) Azeroth, leveling-up in the new zones, seeing the new dungeons, etc. I suppose I like exploring (though, I'm not an explorer, as I don't like typifying players; rather prefer typifying behavior).
But now that I've done that, what do I have to fall back on? Just numbers and the maximizing thereof? I sometimes think that every design decision in the last 5 years was purposefully done to narrow legitimate play, not just encouraging number play but normalizing it. I started on an RP server way back when, yet these days all I seem to be doing is theorycrafting (or, more precisely, consuming theorycraft). It makes me uncomfortable.
Even more uncomfortable is the thought that maybe the reason why no one seems to be able to compete with WoW is because they don't focus on number crunching as much... Is that true?
It's that time again... the persistent rush at the beginning of each new cycle of time to reflect and predict. Well, we like that sort of thing around here. Sometimes we're right, sometimes wrong. But we're always trying to draw out our inner oracles...
My 2011 (and onward) predictions:
- our small people will continue to overrun our Facebook accounts as they fiend for more and more digital bling, especially since Facebook apparently doesn't let kids under 13 have their own accounts. I will continue to shell out the credit card for $10 of 'presents' for my kid's best gamer friends. Perhaps this economic boom will fuel the 'maybe we will survive this media change!' mentality.
- the fantasy MMO reaches saturation levels except for the truly committed. This is not a lore problem, but a pattern matching one. Expect regeneration in 5-10 years or when the new LOTR movie comes out. Oh wait. Guild Wars 2. Does war count as fantasy?
- more 'brand-affirming' virtual worlds. Some might be good.
- more alternative/augmented reality and transmedia MMOs (mobile plus tv plus Kinect plus books plus movies plus 3D-everything). More and more exodus.
- more sci fi, speculative fiction, near term possibility exploration (simulation, as predicted by Ted eons ago)
- Is the MMO inside out yet? More and more I find myself gaming with people like my ex mother-in-law (lovely woman, not a gamer of any description tho!)
- More worlds, fewer games? (does Facebook count as a world?)
- The phrase 'casual gaming' will die as everyone begins to game, casually and otherwise. Already so in South Korea (I find it useful to consider parts of Asia as possible reflections of our future(s)).
- The gaming industry will more fully begin to fund and rely on research.
- Singularity?
There are far too many of my interests resurrected in this post. Please add your favorite memes and join me in documenting our predictions! (how will we otherwise remember?)
I don’t understand why Tron: Legacy has come in for so much critical abuse. I like it as much as my colleague Bob Rehak does. Just taken as an action film, it’s considerably more entertaining and skillful than your usual Michael Bay explosion fest, with set-pieces a good deal more exciting than its predecessor. However, like the original Tron, the film also has some interesting ways of imagining digital culture and digital spaces, and more potently, some subtle commentary about some of the imaginative failures of the first generation of digital designers.
Some critics seemed disappointed that the film takes place in a closed system, the Grid, created by Jeff Bridges’ Kevin Flynn, expecting it to ape the original film’s many correspondences between its virtual world and the technology of mainframe computing and early connectivity. In the original Tron, once Kevin Flynn finds himself inside the world of software and information, he finds himself meeting embodied programs that correspond to actual software being used in the real world, he has a companion bit who can only communicate in binary, he has to make it to an I/O tower so that the program Tron can communicate to his user and so on. Critics seemed to expect that Kevin Flynn’s son would be transported inside a world built on the contemporary Internet, that he would venture from Ye Olde Land of Facebook on a Googlemobile past the some pron-jpg spiders scrambling around the landscape of Tumblr and then catch a glimpse of the deserted wasteland of Second Life.
The director wisely avoided that concept, but I nevertheless think the film is in fact addressing at least one “real” aspect of contemporary digital culture. Kevin Flynn, trapped inside the Grid for more than a decade, discovers that his basic aspirations in creating a virtual world of his own were fundamentally misdirected. He sets out to build a private, perfect world populated by programs of his own design. The complexity of the underlying environment that he creates turns out to be a “silicon second nature” that spontaneously generates a form of a-life that uses some of what he’s put into the environment but that also supercedes his designs and his intentions. Too late, he realizes that the unpredictability of this a-life’s future evolution trumps any aspiration he might have had in mind for his world. Too late because his majordomo, a program of his own creation, modeled on himself, called Clu, stages a coup d’etat and continues Flynn’s project to perfect the world by eliminating contingency, unpredictability, organicism, redundancy. In exile, Flynn realizes that the most perfect thing he’s ever seen is imperfect, unpredictable life itself: the son he left behind, the life of family and community, and the life he accidentally engendered within a computer-generated world.
Whether the analogy was intended or not, that narrative strikes me as a near-perfect retelling of the history of virtual world design from its beginnings to its current stagnant state. The first attempts to make graphically-based persistent virtual worlds as commercial products, all of them built upon earlier MUD designs, sometimes made a deliberate effort to have a dynamic, organic environment that changed in response to player actions (Ultima Online’s early model for resource and mob spawning). But even products like Everquest and Asheron’s Call offered environments which could almost be said to be shaped by virtual overdetermination: underutilized features, half-fleshed mechanics, sprawling environments, stable bugs and exploits that gave rise to entire subcultures of play, all contributing to worlds where the tangle of plausible causalities made it difficult or impossible for either players or developers to fully understand why things happened within the gameworld’s culture or what players might choose to do next.
Some of the next generation of virtual worlds, such as Star Wars: Galaxies, ran into these dynamics even more acutely. Blizzard, on the other hand, launched World of Warcraft with a clear intent to make a persistent-world MMO that was more tractable and predictable as well as one that had a more consistent aesthetic vision and a richer, more expertly authored supply of content.
That they succeeded in this goal is now obvious, as are the consequences of their success: other worlds have withered, faded or failed, unable to match either the managerial smoothness or content supply offered by Blizzard. Those that remain are either desperately trying to reproduce the basic structure of WoW or have moved towards cheap, fast development cycles and minimal after-launch support with the intent to make a profit from box sales alone, in the model of Cryptic’s recent products.
With the one major exception, as always the lone exception, of Eve Online. In terms of Tron: Legacy, Eve is the version of the Grid where the a-life survived. Though in the film, the a-life, the isomorphic algorithms, that appears are said to be innocent, creative, imaginative; the moral nature of Eve’s organic, undesigned world is infamously rather the opposite.
But what Eve proves has also been proven by open-world single player games like Red Dead Redemption or the single-player version of Minecraft: many players crave unpredictable or contingent interactions of environment, mechanics and action. In RDR, if you take a dislike to Herbert Moon, the annoyingly anti-semitic poker player, you can go ahead and kill him, in all sorts of ways. He’ll be back, but more than a few players found some pleasure in doing their best to get rid of him in the widest range of creative ways. You can solve quests in ways that I'm fairly sure the designers didn't anticipate, using the environment and the mechanics to novel ends. You can do nothing at all if you choose, and the world is full of things to do nothing with.
Open-world single-player games allow a range of interactions that Blizzard long since banished from the World of Warcraft. In the current expansion of WoW, I spent a few minutes trying to stab a goblin version of Adolf Hitler in the face rather than run quests on his behalf, even knowing, inevitably, that I would eventually end up opposing his Indiana-Jones-derived pseudo-Nazis and witnessing his death. I’d have settled for the temporary resolution that RDR allows with Herbert Moon, but WoW is multiplayer and Blizzard has decided that the players aren’t allowed to do anything that inconveniences, confuses or complicates the play of other players.
I don’t know that this is Blizzard’s fault, exactly: the imperfections of virtual worlds are precisely what so many of us have spent so much time discussing, worrying about, and trying to critically engage. Trolls, Barrens chat, griefers: you name it, we (players, scholars, developers) have fretted about it, complained about it, and tried to fix it.
The problem is that the fix has become the same fix CLU applied to the Grid: perfection by elimination, perfection by managerialism. What now strikes me as apparent is that this leaves virtual worlds as barren and intimidated as the Grid has become in the movie, and as bereft of the energetic imperfections of life. That way lies Zynga, eventually: the reduction of human agency in play to the repetitions of code, to binary choices, to clicks made when clicks are meant to be made.
Where the spirit of open worlds survives, it survives either because the worlds are open but the hell of other players has been banished and the game stays safely single-player or minimally multiplayer or because the world has surrendered to a Hobbesian state of nature, to a kind of 4chan zeitgeist.
I can’t help but wonder, as Flynn does, whether there’s some slender remnant possibility that is neither of these.
While wandering through Mass Effect 2, I was struck with the vitality of the world. Circa 2004, the main attraction of a multiplayer environment relative to single player worlds was that single player worlds felt dead. Multiplayer, on the other hand, had vitality but also the annoyances of dealing with other people and their inevitable failure to be perfect friends, or perfect foils.That problem can be reduced by Social Engineering (SE): Designers use policy (sometimes enforced by code) to optimize an individual's experience when dealing with others. Judging from ME2, the problem of dead single-player worlds can be addressed successfully using a suite of tools involving digital storytelling, emotive animations, deep conversation scripts, and a strong responsiveness of the emotive/relational space of characters to the protagonist's actions. Altogether, let's call this bag of tricks "Artificial Emotion" or AE. It's not a new term, indeed Professor Turkle has paved the way here, as before.
As the market for fantasy evolves, these two approaches to improving happiness seem to be facing off.
Would humans be happier in an environment constructed just for them, when every other being behaves just so, even though none of those beings are actually people? Or would they be happier to live with other real people in an optimally designed social environment? Is it easier to improve AE or SE?The issues extend far beyond the game industry. In this area as in others, the game industry is charting territory that business and governments will deal with soon enough. If developments in SE dominate those in AE, look for a future of massively-linked online communities whose policies produce much more happiness than offline communities. If AE wins, look for a future involving isolation pods. Most likely, we will have both. As for offline existence, SE advances might translate into better governance in the real world - better companies, better neighborhoods, better schools. AE advances seem less likely to help the offline world.
Life in the soon-to-be-launched Old Republic may combine the best SE and the best AE in one world.
Call me a fan girl, but I think a little revolution snuck up on us while we weren’t looking.
[nepotism alert: I do work at Microsoft, but not currently in games. However I have been hearing about Kinect for a long time, under the codename Project Natal, whispered around the usability labs with a reverance usually limited to the more deserving nirvana or mecca.]
Moving your body instead of your controller(s) creates a range of viscera that surely denote a million possible magic circles. Sure Wii paved the way and some may continue to like that experience, but this is true evolution. The controller-less interface liberates developers to entertain any possibility for interaction. Select the best aspects, refine them, imagine what’s possible, and what people want that they don’t even know they want.
I have been watching my kid play since digital Santa delivered the magic device: dancing, delighted, shouting AWESOME!! repeatedly, enchanted by the physical experiences enabled by a small black bar, with wonder shouting ‘Mommy, I can fly!!’, nurturing pets and programming hamsters to compliment her in the way she loves. Always, always MOVING! ‘You can do two players and you don’t have to select anything, the second person can just jump right in!’, she crows. Techno-ambivalent auntie is even awed as they play dodgeball with one person controlling legs and another controls arms.
I'm enchanted in a somewhat uncustomary way: gamer-me, parent-me, vain-me (unboring exercise!), citizen-me and educator-me. We’re living in the future, people.
And now we have it, a Kinected WoW. Next time you see me: 30 pounds lighter.
A recent report in the Wall Street Journal reveals that Deep Packet Inspection is making a comeback. DPI allows analysts to work over the packets you send out and mine them for patterns relevant to problems like, deciding which ads to send your way. Earlier versions of this technology encountered much blowback due to privacy concerns. The current generation of promoters say that privacy is respected. In discussing how the systems handle privacy, the promoters make some interesting revelations about a completely different matter: Personality. It turns out that if I want to target ads to you very closely, I will tailor my pitches in different ways at different times of the day. You're just not the same consumer at work as you are at home. In a very interesting shift, one vendor mentioned in the article, Kindsight, says that it delivers information not on people but on characters. Characters - just like game characters. Yes: The shifting of character identified by Turkle and others in social media worlds is verified in DPI of our online behavior in general. In fact our shifting selves are so distinct from one another that someone can make money by identifying and tracing the differences.
Do we have shifting identities offline as well? Is the person unified, or is each person actually many people in one? The formula for the Trinity is "One God, Three Persons," and if one objects that that seems awfully contradictory, one is told that it is simply a mystery, something that need not make sense to be true. It is true whether logical or not.
Are we mysteries like this? Can we be one person but also several characters at the same time? An 8-sided die is one unified object and 8 different objects, all at the same time. You might also say it is one object with 8 states. Or, it is one object that appears as a different object from time to time, according to some standard of what makes for a relevant difference.
When we play RPGs we typically make not one character but many. This portfolio of characters - does it basically just extend the same process of character creation that we deploy for our offline selves? A new face for the die? When Kindsight examines my packets, will it treat my game characters just as it treats my workday research character, my evening politics character, and my weekend shopper character? "O, that's his female rogue. She never buys anything. Don't send the ad until The Shopper comes back."
The economy continues to move slowly and economists seem as uncertain as ever about the causes and what to do. Months ago, I began to wonder – could this possibly be the first “exodus recession”? In my first book I sketched out the idea. Suppose economic activity moves from the real world into the virtual world. Human happiness is unaffected or even goes up, however, the goods that produce the happiness are now produced and consumed in a virtual environment rather than the real one. Measurements of economic activity, being all based in the real economy, would begin to show weakness. I argued that contemporary political and economic control systems do not tolerate much weakness, thus, there might well be some sort of crisis in the real world, for no good reason, simply because production and consumption was going “off the books” and into virtual environments. One term for this would be an "exodus recession" - an economic downturn caused by the movement of human attention and energy into virtual environments.
Are we in an exodus recession right now?
First, let's consider the reasoning by which an interest in virtual things would cause a recession in real life. Why would a movement to digital living cause a recession? My point of view has to be preceded by a disclaimer. Despite years of training by macroeconomists, I have to confess that I don’t feel that we (they or I) understand the macroeconomy very well. For better or worse, I tend not to look at macroeconomics using the Keynesian and Monetarist models bequeathed to economics students today. Over the years I’ve become convinced that the macroeconomy is primarily a matter of mass psychology. If we believe that the economy will grow, it will. Employers will invest and hire, workers will borrow and spend. If we believe that the economy will shrink, it will. Employers will hang onto cash and lay off workers, workers will save their money. Log-rolling and self-confirming expectation rule the day, in much the same way that money’s value is a huge social convention. So is the safety of your bank deposit a convention, insisting that the deposit is safe. Convention – think of the economy’s health as a social convention, an aspect of culture. After World War II, Germany and Japan – the most beaten down nations in human history – suddenly became the most vibrant economically. Is it because their governments (and ours) gave them a stimulus? Or was it because their governments carefully preserved the real purchasing power of their currency? Probably not. We call these events “miracles” because the models don’t explain them at all. The economic miracles happened because Germans and Japanese decided, on a cultural level, to be vibrant economies. Workers threw themselves into consumption and work. Companies threw themselves into investing and hiring. The economies grew like crazy. Hope is the thing to hope for; fear fear.The sensitivity of the state of the economy to our cultural understanding of the state of the economy is greater than ever. We live today in a world where the health of the economy is a widely-reported and narrowly-followed pseudo-fact. Business people focus like laser beams on employment figures, GDP growth rates, and so on. If the GDP growth rate falls from 3% per year to -1% per year – Ye Gods! It’s the end of the world! The impact of such changes on the happiness of an individual person is minimal by itself. But when we read about such things, we all react. Hiring doesn’t happen. Purchases are not made. Lo and behold, the drop from 3% to 1% becomes a drop from 1% to -2%, unleashing another round of anguish. People start to lose jobs – which DOES affect their happiness, a great deal.
The central government responds with stimulus and quantitative easing, none of which will work unless we all believe that a stimulus or QE is just the thing to make everyone believe that the economy is turning around. And if we all have some kind of pessimism about the long haul, if we believe that none of this is going to work, it just won’t – whatever Lord Keynes said.
In such an environment, even a little thing, if persistent, could touch off a prolonged mood of pessimism. Is it possible that the virtual economy is that thing?
George Will recently wrote about the increasing speed with which our experiences are going digital. Using data from Robert Weissenstein, chief investor for Credit Suisse, he notes that “In 2001, the iPod arrived. Less than a decade later, the number of employees of music stores has declined from about 80,000 to 20,000.” And “Three million iPods were sold in 2.5 years; 3 million Kindles were sold in two years; 3 million iPads were sold in 80 days; 3 million iPhones were sold in three weeks.”
Let’s construe the notion of “virtual economy” quite broadly: If you receive an experience by yourself through a machine that runs on digital technology, without doing or buying anything physical (other than press a few buttons), it’s virtual. To download a song and listen to it on your iPod is virtual; to go to a concert is real, to buy a CD and play it is real, to play your own instrument is real. The difference I want to highlight is in the physical nature of the economic transaction. The virtual transaction does not require the movement or alteration of anything physical. Not even physical money changes hands. The real transaction involves material being created, moved, consumed, all by human hands.
Using these concepts, there’s some evidence that an exodus from the real to the virtual is not only already underway (as I argued in my second book) but that’s it’s gotten big enough to affect our sense of a whether the real economy is healthy or not. In support, here’s a series of random judgments about the state of the real world.
TV viewing is down among 18-34 year old males, and movie attendance is flat. Meanwhile, more and more time is being spent online or playing videogames. If you want to get 80 hours of fun watching movies, you need $1000. You can get the same fun from a game for $50. Spending time online or playing videogames simply involves less expenditure in the real economy.
Human eyeballs see a lot fewer ads than they used to. As noted, some people are watching less TV. For most others, the TV they’re watching is increasingly DVR’d or Hulu’d, that is, stripped of ad content. On the internet, we avoid ads easily – they are usually in the periphery, and if not we can click them away, or surf to something else. Advertisers have made an industry on the presumption that ads make people buy things. If they are right, it follows that fewer ads would result in us buying less. Ads are less and less a part of our daily experience. HBO’s success with a show about evil advertisers is perhaps apt now, because we feel we finally have gotten the upper hand on these miscreants. The net result of our power over advertisers, according to their own model, would be a weakness in general real-world consumption.
Facebook is a great way for people to connect. In some FB games, you can buy someone else a beer. You can poke them, write on their wall, friend them. None of this causes anything in the real world to be moved or changed. There are 500m people on FB, hundreds of millions more on other, similar social networking sites. If you’re friending people on FB, you’re ever so slightly less likely to be sending them a real Hallmark card, ever so slightly less likely to write them a note on paper, ever so slightly less likely to give them a call. That’s probably not going to turn around, either. Our ability to socialize online puts a crimp in our general need to move stuff or change stuff in the real world.
People who spend time online don’t have to worry about what they are wearing. Suppose that some percent of a given day can be spent in pajama’s, the rest must be spent in decent clothes. For decent clothes, you need a whole and varied wardrobe. For PJ’s, you need a few comfy ones. Now increase the amount of time that can be spent in PJ’s. The demand for decent clothes falls, if ever so slightly. The internet allows us to do all kinds of stuff in our PJ’s – so it must have an ever so slightly dampening effect on the market for fashion.
One could go on. It is possible, slightly, that there’s a general weakness in consumer spending simply because, to get our social, emotional, informational, and needs met, we just need fewer movies, fewer beers, fewer trips, fewer shoes, fewer things in general. What if the world of human beings suddenly became converted to the idea of consuming less stuff? Why, there’d be a recession, of course. Less buying means fewer jobs and less investment, which means economic contraction. It would mean a general pessimism about the prospects of business.
If our culture suddenly went Green, for example, we would have a recession but we would also understand its cause. We would know that a dissatisfaction with materialism led to economic weakness. But if this conversion to less consumption came from a different and more obscure source, how would we identify it? What if real world consumption refused to grow not because people were becoming hippies, but because they remained selfish materialists who had, however, come to enjoy virtual matter? If an exodus recession were underway, what would the world look like?
For one thing, the general pessimism about the economy in an exodus recession would not extend to the industries that produce virtual experience. Indeed, the video game and social networking industries are booming right now. Computer and digital entertainment hardware and software – doing quite well, thank you. Bold innovations in devices happen every year, and the number of apps is skyrocketing.
Another aspect of an exodus recession would be that consumers, in general, would not be expressing much general pessimism about being consumers. There’d be no sign that people had given up on the idea of buying and selling things. They’d be as interested in money, the economy, and jobs as ever. However, they would consistently say that they’re slightly less interested in buying a washing machine than they were last year. You don’t have to do as much washing when you spend more time living through your avatar. They’re going to be slightly less interested in a car because they’re not going to go driving around quite as much. This has nothing to do with malaise or lack of government stimulus or the conversion of a culture to moderate spending. It begins with people buying digital stuff instead of real stuff. And indeed, we find in the recent US election that people are very interested in jobs and the economy. Yet collectively they seemed to react less powerfully than expected to efforts to stimulate their real-world spending. This would make sense if people are turning their consuming energy to mp3s, FB gadgets, and Xbox Live Achievements. Having a new road is not going to have much effect on an economy based on digital goods.
These are all conjectures, of course. It’s a what-if. Is it possible? I thought we would not see a real-world recession caused by the removal of consumption energy into virtual environments until sometime in the far future. But I didn’t think about the possibility that the term “virtual environment,” in its economic meaning, might expand to environments as diverse as Hulu and Facebook. Are people now spending enough time fiddling around with digital stuff that their interest in physical stuff has weakened to the point that it catalyzes an ongoing cycle of economic pessimism? Perhaps not. But some trends certainly point in that direction. Even if this is not the first exodus recession, one wonders how far off that first one may be.
On IGN, an announcement for the Michael Jackson MMO we've all been waiting for: Planet Michael. The announcer 'couldn't stop laughing'. No violence. You win using 'the power of dance'. Using your keyboard, not your actual body. Free to play. Virtual items will be available for 'real-world currency'. Charitable contributions enabled.
From the press release:
Planet Michael will be an immersive virtual space themed after iconic visuals drawn from Michael’s music, his life and the global issues that concerned him. Entire continents will be created that will celebrate Michael’s unique genius in a way that underscores his place as the greatest artist of all time. Michael’s longtime fans will feel at home as they find themselves in places that seem familiar and yet unknown at the same time, and new generations will discover and experience Michael’s life in a way never before imagined. At its core, Planet Michael is a massive social gaming experience that will allow everyone, from the hardcore fan to the novice, to connect and engage in collaborative in-game activities with people worldwide.
Though my initial inclination was to disparage, maybe this could work... MMO universes drawn from the world-views of famous individuals. Elvis-verse? BeatlesWorld? DalaiLamaUniverse? PicassoPlanet? LadyGagaLand! I'm impressed that Planet Michael's mechanics are designed to uphold his pacifist leaning and philanthropic efforts, and I can imagine that forays into his imaginings are ripe with possibility <chortle>.
I predict the vanity MMO will become a trend, and as much as I hate to say it, could be the break-through-to-the-mainstream (the Second Life commercial push all over again). What do you all think? Will we see the Housewives of Beverly Hills obsessed with their first virtual worlds?
Disclaimer: I confess to being a fangirl of NCSoft, publishers of City of Heroes, which I studied for about 5 years. They have also published the Lineages, the original Guild Wars and Aion.
So...
The intrepid warriors from NCSoft and ArenaNet are presaging the pre-holiday beta launch of Guild Wars 2 with a declaration of independent thinking. More on that in a sec.
First off, let's review its pre-cursor, the original Guild Wars. What made it obsession-worthy?
- accessible to the 'casual', newbie MMO gamer.
- highly instanced combat (Sir Richard cringed).
- grouping that includes NPC mercenaries.
- very beautiful emotes like the Monk's dance. Amazing landscapes, architecture, everything.
- alternative play modes allowing high-level play for the low-level n00b.
- observer mode: enjoy the gank gladiator-style, you emerge un-scathed.
- 'no loot stealing, spawn camping, and endless travel'.
- guild capes (I confess to leaving guilds if they had ugly designs that didn't match my outfits. How shallow of me!)
I have more than a few opinions about what an exciting, 21st century MMO might encompass. Happy to say it appears that true evolution is in the works. Deviations/expansions of established MMO conventions in Guild Wars 2:
- Doing away with the grind. Not all will agree this is a good thing, but as my kid says, there is nothing worse than a videogame that is both 'hard and BORING'.
- New character classes (professions) like the Ranger.
- Personalized story-lines. NPCs remember you. You are not on the exact same quest path as everyone else, with the same goals, outfits, spells, items, etc. at the same levels.
- Cause and effect prevail, personal agency is paramount. Changes you effect on the environment persist.
- Dynamic events, a mechanic that has worked very well for CoX.
- PvP in non-zoned, non-instanced areas. Huge-scale world vs world combat events.
- Variations on healing and death rituals.
And for the techno-geeky among you, it's all being built on a new physics engine, Havok, that allows the designers and developers to more fully realize their conceptual vision:
We're creating a world, and what's the point of exploring a world if
there isn't the awe and wonder, you know? We try to create those moments
of awe and wonder. - Jeff Grubb, ArenaNet
For those of you who don't readily embrace change, Guild Wars servers will continue running, and an ongoing free trial is on offer.
Any predictions on the effect on social dynamics, innovations that are likely to stick, etc? Other games trying new things? My kid, for instance, is obsessed with Wizards 101, a pay-for-stuff-the-kid-MUST-have MMO that creates accessibility and safety for the semi-literate aspiring gamer.
I think things are about to get very exciting in Videogame Land. To over-use an over-used term, epic!
More on GW2:
I ended my previous post by asking: If we are to make reality, what should we make? Lisa then posted evidence that our powers of creation are growing. We are becoming ever more able to immerse our attention in worlds of fantasy. Richard Bartle, getting straight to the point, asks: Where will it go?
We will be living in worlds of pure imagination, and that right soon from a historical perspective. Doesn't this reveal the normative question in the most commanding way? If imagination is what will be, we need to ask what that should be. We are gaining the power, and with power comes responsibility.
By what standard should worlds of imagination be judged? From what source do we derive the moral criteria, the normative stances, necessary to decide what worlds to make? Surely the source is not logic and reason; imagination is not fact. Worlds of imagination cannot be true or false. They can be good or bad - that's the moral question - but what makes them good or bad? The answer must involve aesthetics. Judging the moral worth of an imaginary world begins with its aesthetics. Is it Beautiful? Apt? Shocking? Thought-provoking? Balanced? Engaging?
I cannot think of any area of thought more muddled than aesthetics is today (see Dutton). Yet judgment of beauty should be a well-developed ability of all people. Art should not be judged by its politics or its ability to reject any expressed standard. It should be comprehensible without reading 1,000 pages of arcane theory. Great works should be more than tourist attractions, they should be treated as achievements well worthy of respect.
The imaginary worlds being created all around us deserve respectful appreciation, first, and secondly, they should be subjected to inquiry on aesthetic grounds. Those grounds are not mere whims of the observer; they have universal elements. Dignity is an important touchstone here. On entering a new virtual environment, proceed with care and ask whether the world you find is uplifting for the human person.
By way of background: about a year ago, W&L held a symposium entitled Protecting Virtual Playgrounds: Children, Law, and Play Online. Lots of TerraNovans were there. The panelists gave some really great papers, which we turned into an issue of the Washington & Lee Law Review (that issue goes to press this month). And that's a good thing, because the papers were ready when Congress asked the FTC to report on the potential availability of adult materials to kids in virtual worlds. (The FTC's report is due out in early December.) More on my personal paper, which ended up with the title Virtual Parentalism, after the fold.
There are three things I find interesting about what I perceive to be the regulatory approach we're on. The first is that targeting a medium of communication because of some content that is available via that medium feels like a road we've been down before. This really feels like Congress's prior, failed attempts to regulate porn on the internet by arguing that protecting children is a sufficient reason to shut down protected adult-to-adult expression. The Supreme Court has said no repeatedly to this approach. Congress cannot force everyone using a communications medium to limit their expression to that which would be appropriate for children.
The second concern is practical. I really enjoy playing with my kids in virtual worlds, and I think that my presence with them in virtual worlds is the single best guarantor of their safety. I worry that segregating virtual worlds into children's and adults' spaces will not serve goals of child safety. Further, I think that it destroys a lot of what makes virtual worlds fun -- their ability to put communities back together, rather than tear them apart. World of Warcraft is a game I enjoy playing with my kids. There aren't all that many of those. Snakes and ladders, for example, causes me to cry bitter, bitter tears.
The third concern is a mix of practical and legal: I wonder if courts will or can use the reasoning they used in the cases above. What saved the internet from broad censorship was the possibility of private filtering. For lawyers, that's a strange argument -- normally Congress is prohibited from regulating speech if there is a less-restrictive law it could pass instead. The possibility of private action doesn't usually block Congress from regulating. But in these internet cases, the argument that Congress had to facilitate private action by law rather than regulate directly appeared to have some traction. That is, because Congress could have promoted private filtering by law, it was prohibited from direct regulation.
There have got to be some limits to this idea, I'm the first to admit. But my guess is that filtering will be a big part of the debate about regulation of virtual worlds, and my concern is that filtering is not where it needs to be in virtual worlds in order to fend off regulatory efforts. /Ignore is a great start. It is not nearly enough to fend off Congress.
As always, I'm deeply interested in your thoughts and comments either on the short-form thoughts above, or on the paper itself.
Adj. The belief that through games the world can become a better place.
There is a growing body of work that, to a greater or lesser extent, suggests that games can make the world better. The notion is generally that through participation in a game we actors gain some form of improved outcome. The scope of outcome ranges from the narrow sense of, say, an educational outcome for an individual or the wider sense of a social change brought about through game culture.
In applying the term Ludotopian I want to capture more the sense of a grand ideal than the unreal nature of utopianism.
The two main users of this notion in contemporary writing are TerraNova’s own Edward Castronova and Jane McGonigal.
Most here are probably aware of Castronova’s work Exodus to the Virtual World which I think is the grandest statement of the potential power of games, in this case virtual spaces, and their impact on society as a whole.
While Castronova might have the grandest statement I think that McGonigal in her various keynotes and blog posts presents possibly the most evangelistic and enthusiastic case for the broad good of the practice of game participation. In particular I would point to her work on ARGs which suggest that goods (that is various forms of 'the good') can be derived from participation in acts that make up the game, the meta-social elements that establish the community of gamers and in some cases such as world without oil the actual outcome of the game itself.
I think in both cases we can say that there is an underlying thesis that goes beyond games being just one more human practice that happens to have beneficial outcomes. I contrast this with work in fields such as education that tend to point to the positive side of gaming but tend to be less broad about its good in relation to other learning methods.
I’m aware that I’m remiss in this post in not doing a broader literature search, though I’m keen to understand where ludotopianism emerged from and how its growth is related to the social changes in which academics and writers have working.
If such a thing as ludotopianism really exists, what was the first work that truly encapsulated it?
I was sick on Wednesday, and missed the annual Game Studies Download featuring Terra Nova co-author Mia Consalvo and the amazing Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost. (Perhaps Mia will post about that talk...) But on Friday I was healthy enough to make it to the "Pouring Fuel on the Fire: Game Designers' Rant," which included Jane as well.
The session was wonderful--engaging and inspirational. I took copious notes, which follow.
Host Eric Zimmerman of Gamelab started out by saying that this is the year of game design. Portal winning game of the year was very much an indication of how great game design matters. A few years ago, experimental and indie games were still on the fringe; now they're being recognized. But game designers are typically slotted below technologists and graphics people when it comes to credit for a game.
Clint Hocking (Ubisoft): The problem game designers face isn't creative stagnation. It's having the courage to create something that challenges people...that's f---ing hard. Yes, games are art. Yes, games can make you cry. Why don't we learn from the creativity of small games? Why doesn't that get plugged into our blockbuster games? Why can't Call of Duty be about DUTY? Why isn't Medal of Honor about HONOR? What if you could put HONOR in a box and SELL it? Package the experience of knowing what it is to be honorable? 90% of the people in this world have never felt honor, and probably would love to. Imagine if you could be awarded a medal of honor in a game where you had to be HONORABLE to do it. Instead, we spend millions on games, many of which are DOA. Meanwhile these great, meaningful indie games are unknown. I'm not saying we should all quit our jobs and making quirky small games. I'm talking about using proven techniques to make things that people CARE about. Even with 6 million Halo users, you've reached only 10% of the audience size of the LoTR movies. That movie is fundamentally about the mechanics of TRUST. Those should not harder to simulate than the mechanics of ROPE. Product fetishism keeps trumping everything else--is it any surprise that the game of the year is about a f---ing CUBE?! What we lack is not creativity, what we lack is the courage to show we care about real stuff. Every time we make a game that fails to be about what real people care about, we're letting ourselves down. We have the creativity, the money, the demand. "F-ck, it's code. We can do anything."
===
John Mak: He asks the audience to stand up, brings up the house lights, and turns on music that's all about fun. People at the sides of the room start throwing out balloons, which the audience instinctively knows to start batting around. But some (most) have messages, which causes people to grab and read them before passing them on. ("I'm you're friend, play with me." "Give me to someone to form a tag team." etc). The look of delight on the face of the audience members is wonderfully gratifying. People are laughing and taking pictures. But as this winds down, Kim Swift of Portal fame is somehow (via a balloon? a person?) brought up to the podium in John Mac's place, and she has nothing to say. All this potential energy goes nowhere. (Not everything, it seems, is best left to chance...)
===
Jane McGonigal: I'm not mad at game designers. Compared to the rest of the world, we have it all figured out. Our medium kicks all other media's ass. We make more people happy than any other platform or content in the world. (If you don't believe that, you're not paying attention to what's happening.) We've won. Games have won. As an industry we've spent the last 30 years learning how to optimize experience. Brains, bodies (recently), and hearts are all engaged. That's the good news.
The bad news is we rule the virtual world only. Reality is broken, and we're not fixing it, we're offering alternatives to it. We offer better experiences, better socialization, in virtual experiences. That needs to start changing. If reality is broken, why aren't game designers trying to fix it? It's our responsibility to design systems that make us happy and successful and powerful in real life? We have the power and the responsibility. [you go girl!!!]
(Jane shows an image of her favorite "I'm not good at life." graffiti.) There's nothing in real life that I'm as good at in game worlds. I have spent the last year doing research on happiness. Instead of trying to figure out what's broken, these people are trying to figure out what makes us happy. Every positive psychologist has found the same thing. Happiness is 1) having satisfying work to do, 2) the experience of being good at something, 3) time spent with people we like, and 4) a chance to be part of something bigger than ourselves.
If you are a game designer you are in the happiness business.
In 1931, the newspapers ran a headline that announced "Soap kills germs!" They didn't even know that then. We've been making soap, and don't realize it kills germs.
We have good lives, most of us. But many people buying our games don't. The game gives them a higher quality of life than the real world does.
Why should we care about games? Because life is crap, and the only thing that makes it worth living is art and play.
We need a new headline: GAMES KILL BOREDOM Games are the ultimate happiness engine.
Let's think about five places where I wish games could make my life better. 1) running, 2) being on a plane, 3) playing fetch, 4) commuting, 5) dealing with annoying people.
Why don't I level up when I go running? make an nike ipod MMO!!!
Why isn't there a game I can play the whole time I'm on the plane?
The Sniflabs collar remembers other dogs you've encountered. We can play games with our dogs. What if I could play an mmo with my dog?
Trackstick...traces where you are and have been. Currently used for enterprise activites, but why couldn't we use it when we commute--lay a virtual world over the real one and navigate through it with the gps receiver.
If I could wear a thing that allows me zap peole I don't like with my mind, my life would be so much better. (She doesn't elaborate on how to make this happen, but I suspect she has ideas about that.)
Alter your reality. Help me save the world.
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Guest ranter Chris Hecker: Apparently his rant last year was quite controversial, so he starts with a very long disclaimer about wanting people not to misrepresent him based on misunderstandings of his talk.
("movies and books taped together with duct tape" seems to have been the key phrase; shows some funny emails and wikipedia and comic responses to his talk)
Rants are important. Complacency = Death. But ranting has to lead to action. I's not true that if you don't have something positive to say you shouldn't say anything at all. criticism is valuable, even when it's not actively constructive. You have to be able to point out when things are broken. However you do it, it's important to speak your mind and tell the truth.
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Jenova Chen: As a game designer, my job isn't to set fires, it's to make stuff. This has been a great year, with lots of innovation. Clint raised some of the same questions I wanted to talk about. Can a game make you cry? Can a game be art? New methods of distribution are reducing the costs for great indie games. Many are even moving to consoles (like his).
I can't rant as a designer, but I can rant as a gamer. I'm losing my interest in playing the new games coming to market. Fifteen years ago the lowfi games gave me more satisfaction than today's high-end games. What can videogames do that differentiate them from toys? Why are toys different from books, movies, sports as we age? We need mature content. (No, not *that* kind of mature. Not mature = college boys.) Intellectually, can videogames make you learn something more than how to drive a car? We need something more like The Little Prince than The Three Little Pigs.
Great art has come from the authors' own experiences.
Passage by Jason Rohrer is better than this year's blockbuster shooters.
===
Daniel James (3 rings): Talks about how things he loved (Lego, MUDs) have migrated to today's game. We are in the future! The way we bring games to market is changing in great ways. His grandmother is playing puzzle pirates instead of watching TV. w00t! (waiting for shoe to drop...)
The line is very very thin between virtual and real experience. What are you doing, and how do you justify it afterwards?
What self-respecting virtual worlds blogger could pass up the opportunity to attend an all-star GDC panel on "The Future of MMOs"? Not me, certainly. So at noon on Thursday I found myself in the first row of a crowded room, listening to John Wood (managing editor of MMORPG.com) pose a series of interesting questions to:
* Jack Emmert (Cryptic)
* Matt Miller (NCSOFT)
* Ray Muzyka (BioWare)
* Min Kim (Nexon America)
* Rob Pardo (Blizzard)
What follows are my notes on the session; in many cases the responses are not verbatim, but instead are condensed versions of the key points. I was very impressed with how articulate and thoughtful these questions and answers were; it was an hour well-spent.
First Question: There has been a trend towards outside IP-based games. Can an MMO be successful today without an outside content IP?
Jack: Investors/publishers love outside IP because of the guaranteed fan base. Developers/designers, on the other hand, prefer the creative flexibility of original content. Because the cost of MMOs has exploded, the pressure for outside IP will increase.
Matt: Yes, of course, there will be a trend towards outside IP because people want to play what they know. But smaller publishers will be able to take advantage of the flexibility of original creation.
Ray: All IP is original to begin with, no? The tradeoff between outside IP and original is the licensing vs original cost. To take advantage of licensed content properly you need to really understand the fan base and their needs, so you're simply trading one set of work for another.
Min Kim: We don't typically go towards outside IP, because it's too much of a headache to comply with the various restrictions. Depending on the genre, you may or may not need the name recognition of an outside IP.
Rob: WoW had the advantage of existing IP that the company owned (Warcraft world). It would have taken years longer to make if they'd started from ground zero on content/concept.
Second Question: Are MMOs headed towards consoles? Will companies in the future have to develop for cross-platform?
Jack: Yes.
(laughter)
Yes, of course. Champions Online (Cryptic's just-announced MMORPG) will be developed for consoles as well as PCs, and MMOs will almost definitely migrate. (But, he says pointedly, Blizzard shouldn't bother, it's much too hard, not worth it, etc. More laughter.)
Matt: The console base is larger than the PC base, it only makes sense to target it. [ed. Huh? That doesn't seem right...]
Ray: Not necessarily. There's a huge market on PCs, it's possible to be successful without targeting consoles. There are economic benefits to PCs because it's the largest "open market." Play patterns are different in the two contexts. It's a challenge that can be overcome, but you need to pick and choose your battles.
Min: I agree completely with Ray. Nexon is experimenting a bit with consoles. But for mass market, PC is still the way to go. It's our core market. For example, will consoles allow you to distribute the game for free? If not, the consoles won't work for our business model.
Rob: Of course there are going to be MMOs on consoles. We approach it as "what game do we want to make" and then "where should we put it"? RTS games don't do well on consoles due to user interface constraints. But web-based MMOs have demonstrated they can be huge as well. You just have to pick the system on which your game will be most fun.
Third Question: Will microtransactions be the future of MMO business?
Jack: It's ridiculous to think this is "the" future. Many people like paying one fee and not worrying about details. "Free to pay; buy the items" is fine for some contexts, but it's not the future. This is a 'buzz term' and I hate it. Monthly subscriptions are a much better business model (and even better when people forget about their monthly subscription...bonus free money, he says!) Depending on microtransactions is likely to be about as successful as spamming a million people with "send me a dollar" emails.
Matt: Bizdev folks want subscription income, it's much more reliable from a bookkeeping standpoint. Micropayments are much less predictable.
Ray: "Jack, how do you _really_ feel?" (laughter) It comes down to the game design. What drives your game? What will they be passionate about? If micropayments facilitate that, and fans are actively seeking it, it makes sense. It's the dominant and successful form in Asia, but not so much in the US. It really just depends on the game.
Min: Obviously I'm on the other end of the spectrum, since we only do the model Jack ridicules. We're bigger than NCSoft in Asia and Korea, because our market goes beyond the core market. We can expand to casual players because people can get in easily. Kids can't afford a subscription game; they need microtransactions. It all depends on who you're targeting.
Rob: This is very much an "east vs west" question. In Asia that's the dominant model, which presented a challenge for Blizzard. They didn't want to change the game design. Agrees with Ray--make the great game first, then decide what's the best model for it. Blizzard charges for name changes and server changes--they do that more as a deterrent than a profit motive, but they do make a nice profit from those transactions. Hybrid models would be interesting.
Jack: (Jumps in again, making sparks fly a bit...) Claims that microtransactions are bullshit, that the "pay for play" model that Blizzard uses in Asia doesn't constitute microtransactions. It's not a "magic bullet". It's not "east vs west" and Blizzard is proof of that.
Min: Points out that Maple Story is a great example of micropayments being successful.
Jack: I haven't really heard of Maple Story [ed. Ouch! His credibility just took a huge hit in my book.)
Min: Target has a huge virtual cards market that's evidence of how strong the micropayment model is.
Ray: This is about the people who play the game, and what are you making for them that they love? If you're not giving people who want microtransactions what they want, you're losing potential customers. The models don't need to be mutually exclusive; why not offer both modes of play? If you can do that without compromising your design, fabulous. If not, pick the model that works best for your audience.
Min: What we are selling is excellent user experience; you can make money by selling what users need to enhance that experience. The story they're hearing a lot from teenagers is "I've never played an MMO before, Maple Story is my first one".
Last moderator question: As time goes on, it's more and more expensive to build a topnotch MMO. Can you be successful now without multimillion dollar MMOs?
Jack: There are going to be two tiers of MMOs...the high-end like WoW, which everyone's afraid of, and the low-end. There will be no middle ground.
Matt: There will be small, low-budget MMOs that can be successful with 50K subscribers. There are people in this room making those kind of MMOs. If they get 100K they'll be successful beyond their dreams.
Ray: There are huge barriers to entry for the "WoW competitors". But there are new markets emerging--mobile, web-based, etc. We're making one (won't tell us what, though). Who would have imagined, five years ago, something like "Portal" being the game of the year? It's a small team with a brilliant idea executed perfectly. You can succeed with games like that if you know what you're doing. There is no one business model; you need to tune it to your game and to the audience. You have to know who you are.
Min: The uber-blockbuster won't be a realistic sustainable model for many companies. Nexon typically doesn't do that. None of our teams are over 100 people, and 85% of our revenue comes from item transactions. It's all about the social experience.
Rob: I'm delighted as a business person that nobody wants to make an MMO because Blizzard set the bar too high. But as a game player, I'm disappointed. I wants to see more stuff out there. But you're not just competing against WoW anymore, you're competing with WoW + expansions. Direct contrast is hard, because you're always playing catchup.
Ray: What *is* an MMO? Are multiple sessions of the same game, with strong community around them, MMOs? Lots of players sharing the same experience, if not the same exact sharded space...
First audience question: Can scifi as an MMO genre be as successful from the mainstream point of view? Can it succeed in a fantasy-driven market?
Jack: Yes, scifi can succeed (particularly IP based scifi). Fantasy has the advantage of a known conceptual model--what you do and how you do it is clear to the player. With scifi, players are immediately alienated (haha) because they have less of a strong conceptual model.
Matt: You can build off well-known single-player IP like Mass Effect.
Ray: MMOs at the core is role-playing, and it's an issue of what aspirational fantasy you're enabling. Different games fulfill different fantasies.
Min: It's harder to identify with scifi unless you have the existing well-known IP. I'd love to play "World of Starcraft"... (everyone looks at Rob, who's less than responsive).
Rob: All it takes is the right product. All worlds have their own challenges, but scifi or even contemporary (e.g. GTA) could be successful given the right approach.
Second audience question: What is your vision for user-generated content and addons in MMO?
Jack: Obviously those will have to be there in MMOs. Players want to be able to do this.
Ray: One of their pillars of game play in Neverwinter Nights was a pyramid of user types, based on Bartle's archetypes, that included creators. If you launch with it, and it's part of your campaign, you have great potential for it. Tack it on later, and you run more of a risk. You're most likely to be successful if you bring in great creators early on in the process.
Third audience question: What does the future of MMOs have to do with the future of everything else? (?!)
Ray: The answer is 42. (HA!)
Rob: I see an expansion almost as like another season of your favorite TV show, while a new console game might be more like a feature movie. [ed. fascinating comparison]
Fourth audience question: Is this a healthy industry, or is it really just a few super successful companies and lots of wannabes?
Jack: No, it's not a healthy industry at all. Investors are terrified of going up against WoW. It's scary if you're a fan.
Ray: At Bioware, we approach all of our development with both ambition and humility. We're at a nexus point, and it's an exciting time to be in this field as a developer.
Min: If you're purely targeting the WoW user, the future is bleak. But Maple Story is an example of targeting a different user base. Can you offer a successful and meaningful product to a broader user base?
Last audience question: In microtransactions are unofficial vendors problematic?
Rob: We take a very aggressive stance against outside sellers in WoW, in order to keep people from bringing RL advantages into the game. (That's not true, really, because those with more leisure time end up with an advantage.) For us, it's not a revenue problem but a gameplay problem.
Matt: It's an annoyance problem for players who are inundated with spam in the game. It's a customer service issue more than anything else.
A couple of weeks ago, I was reading Benjamin Duranske's excellent virtual-worlds-and-law blog, Virtually Blind, and came across the following remark:
Most writers, including VB’s editor, take commodification and subsequent legal intervention as a foregone conclusion at this point.
This got me thinking: the first State of Play conference was in November, 2003, and since then the arguments have settled down considerably. When we do get legal intervention, it will be far more informed than it would have been 5 years ago.
I'm wondering, though, what degree of consensus there is out there with regards to how the law "should" treat virtual worlds?
For example, it seems fairly clear now that game-like worlds (such as WoW) are a different kind of animal to non-game worlds (such as SL). People may disagree in the details (for example how much of a defence a developer has to maintain in order to keep their game-like status), but there does seem to be a consensus that supportive legal intervention aimed at one kind of virtual world could hurt the other kind.
What other broad areas of consensus are there? I don't mean what should there be, I mean what are there? Can we say things about virtual property, player rights, IP, or any of the other big issues, that even people on opposing sides of an argument can agree on? Or is everything important pretty much settled now and we're now just arguing about who gets the CD collection?
Richard
Here's a simple question for you, which I suspect does not have a simple answer: why is Fantasy the predominant genre of game-like virtual worlds?
It can't all be down to the influence of The Lord of the Rings, surely?
Richard
Linden Lab has recently changed their policy about gambling in Second Life, effectively banning it (find a clutch of news reports here). The specific demands, in terms of policy and regulation, that gambling and other significant-stakes gaming make on virtual worlds have drawn my attention on TN before. Here I'd like to ask TN-at-large the following: What do you think the effects of this policy are likely to be on SL? On virtual worlds in general (if any)?
The title of this post is also the title of my thesis on IBM’s 3D Internet initiative, of which I would like to share some of the discussions as my final post as a TN guest author. My arguments are within the frameworks of Network Society & Innovation Strategies, and User Driven Vs. Community Driven Innovation.
Network society & Innovation Strategies
The network society described by Castells (2000) in his book; The Rise of the Network Society gives insights to the convergences of the telecommunication, microprocessor, and computer industries as the facilitators of connecting entities in the network society in three stages of diffusion e.g. automation, experimentation, and reconfiguration. And, that openness, equality and grass root commitment were the drivers of the diffusion. Currently, we are in the stage of reconfiguration where technology acts on information, and the network have assimilated diversification and stratification of culture.
The innovation strategies of Christensen (2003 & 2004) speak of the basis of competition and performance gap and surplus, and how product architecture either proprietary or modular should be compliant with the gap or surplus of performance in market demand, for positioning to capture the largest market share. And, how new comers trying to innovate for a sustaining trajectory are almost always bound to fail, and should revert to low-end market solutions for a disruptive trajectory. And, furthermore of new-market disruptions which compete in a nonconsumption market and therefore the market have to be invented from scratch.
Now, the current nonconsumption market of a metaverse development platform or the 3D Internet and experimentation conducted by corporations in Second Life to unlock and invent a profitable market are battling two issues; the openness of the network society and current performance gab in the market to establish a rock solid metaverse development platform for users to experience unlimited user generated content in a high quality graphical environment.
The performance gab in the market would suggest a proprietary solution to the metaverse development platform but I believe at the expense of mass market adoption and counterintuitive to the openness of the current network and web platform. So, my argument is that currently there is a catch 22 in effect, of either attending the performance gab with a proprietary solution or the network society with a modular solution. The latter risking to drive users and businesses away because of instability and lack of performance and the former also risking driving users and businesses away because of inconvenient usability issues of integrating that solution with existing activities.
User driven Vs. Community driven innovation
Another key discussion of the thesis is the notion that community driven innovation reduces the period of negotiating a new market and combat the nonconsumption of new-market disruptions which I believe characterize the current initiatives to establish a standard metaverse development platform for a future 3D Internet and experimentation of services, largely conducted in Second Life and to some extend also in There.
The argument is that the user driven innovation paradigm is fading because it mainly drives the sustaining innovation trajectory of old established markets, because the users in the innovation process are the customers of the client – not the non-customers of the client. Thus, a community of users constituting numerous non-customers are a key for future success.
Furthermore, the argument is that moving into a 3D Internet environment of mediated communication by avatars are facilitating easier access to valuable information from many non-customers to driven the negotiation of a new-market disruption, and ultimately market success.
To end this post, I hope to gain valuable insights from comments to include in the thesis before its turned in next month.
I am a great believer in the potential of virtual worlds as platforms for communication, interaction, discovery, and entertainment. But I am also a realist when it comes to appraising related technologies and user interest in virtual worlds. In this post, I'd like to talk about population projections, and how technology may limit the development of virtual worlds in the next few years.
First, let's take a look at some recent virtual population projections. Earlier this year on Terra Nova, Cory Ondrejka predicted Second Life would reach a peak concurrency of 150,000 by the end of 2007 -- a six-fold increase over the peak level at the beginning of the year.
And just a few weeks ago, the research firm Gartner projected that "80 percent of active Internet users (and Fortune 500 enterprises) will have a 'second life,' but not necessarily in Second Life" by the end of 2011.
Certainly, virtual worlds have been growing in popularity since the beginning of the decade. Some MMO gaming platforms have millions of active players, and the rise in the number of Second Life residents in the past year alone has been nothing short of spectacular: As of the end of April, Second Life's "Total Residents" topped 6 million, after reaching one million accounts just six months earlier (the chart here was generated from Second Life's economic statistics, published by Linden Lab).
Will this trend continue? Can we expect the number of users/residents for individual virtual worlds to double every few months, or every year? Will hundreds of millions of people also have a virtual presence in just four-and-a-half years, as Gartner suggests? If not, when will a majority of "active Internet users" also be active virtual users?
In my opinion, growth in virtual platforms will continue, but at more restrained levels, owing to demographic usage patterns and technical limitations. For instance, in the United States, converting 78 million baby boomers to active MMO gamers or SL participants will be difficult. Most boomers are well below retirement age, and finding the time to join virtual worlds in between existing family and work responsibilities is difficult. Moreover, the boomers, and for that matter, people of all ages already have ample leisure time distractions, including television and traditional Internet use. And even if millions of boomers suddenly wanted to plunge into virtual worlds, perhaps attracted by some killer virtual app or community, would they be able to do so?
I don't think so. Technology would be a barrier, both at the personal level, and at the platform level. Consider Second Life. It is built on an infrastructure that cannot easily scale. Even though millions of people have registered for Second Life, peak concurrency is below 40,000 concurrent users, and many who have attempted to join gatherings of more than a few dozen beings have experienced rendering problems, jitter, or session cutoffs.
In terms of personal technologies, the rapid adoption of mobile, compact computing devices over traditional, desktop PCs will reduce virtual exploration and adoption for many users. While an Alienware laptop is certainly capable of displaying Second Life or WoW in glorious 3D textures and high FPS rates, the standard Dell, Lenovo, and Apple laptops that most people buy don't have dedicated GPUs, and in my experience, the CPUs are not adequate for rendering 3D worlds. I use a 2006 IBM ThinkPad T41 at work, but it chokes on SL, with CPU utilization rates running above 90% when the SL client is connected. The only way I can have a smooth Second Life experience is by using a desktop machine that was purchased for video and audio production.
Beyond laptops, the current generation of mobile devices are not capable of handling virtual worlds. The cutting-edge Apple iPhone sure looks cool, but its browsing capabilities will be unable to extend to virtual worlds when it launches this year -- not only are the on-board processor and screen too small, but also the wireless connection is intended for voice and low-impact multimedia use.
That's not to say the situation is hopeless for portable devices. Moore's Law has been an accurate predictor of processor advances for the past 42 years, and if it holds, the low-end laptops and mobile phones of the year 2012 or 2017 may actually be able to handle virtual interactions.
What do others think of adoption rates, considering some of the demographic and technological issues discussed above? What other data points and factors need to be considered for evaluating Gartner's projection for the year 2011, not to mention Cory's prediction for the end of this year?
So I've been having my usual beginning-of-the-semester chats with my graduate students about their projects and progress. I enjoy these, and I think they do to (they almost never complain about the thumbscrews, or -- more of a shock -- having to read Habermas). One of them, Krista-Lee Malone, is a master's student and long-time gamer who is completing an excellent thesis about hardcore raiding guilds. During our chat she said something about how these raiding guilds went about preparing her to participate in their activities, and it prompted me to follow up on some ideas from here. It's about Foucault, bodies, institutions, and whether the relationship between developers and guilds is changing in important ways.
Krista-Lee plays a priest (one with more purples than I'll ever see for my druid, I'm sure), and what she said was (paraphrasing), "I can healbot Molten Core in my sleep, but if I'm thrown into a new situation, I can't heal at all." While that's probably an overstatement, it suggests something about the nature of raiding guild discipline -- at least, pre-TBC. It turns out, and this is not unusual, that the guild power-leveled her toon and then taught her to follow a very specific and detailed script for the instances they were running, starting with UBRS and then through Naxx.
Michel Foucault famously argued that the power of modern institutions is driven, at root, by the ability to discipline people, or, more directly, to discipline their bodies -- to mold those bodies and order their actions in ways that allow groups to achieve institutional objectives effectively. To do this, they draw on practical techniques developed first in places like early Christian monasteries and the Roman legions. Bodies are organized, regimented, taught to sit, to stand, to kneel, to match their singular shapes to the demands of regularity -- no pinky out of place, the leg held just so. The effect of this "bio-power", as he most convincingly shows in Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, is not only effective institutional control over otherwise unruly subjects, but in fact a re-shaping of their selves. They come to see this discipline as consitutive of who they are, as shaping their very desires. The classic (and idealized -- practice is messier) example is the panopticon, where prisoners are architecturally situated in view of an invisible and authoritative observer. The guard watches from in a darkened room while they are laid out in a brightly-lit Cartesian grid. It comes to matter little if the guard is there at all, as the prisoners internalize the surveillance.
I'm not saying that Krista-Lee was a prisoner of her guild. Um, exactly. Foucault argues (in later works) that this disciplining of bodies is something taking place all around us, particularly as we learn to act within highly-regulated contexts, like schools, the military, hospitals, and airports. And, like the prisoners, he asserts that we come to accept and even celebrate the kind of self the institutions have made of us.
All of this is to get us thinking about to what extent hardcore raiding guilds should be seen in a similar light. The essence of disciplined bodies is that they are malleable; they can be shaped to perform in lock-step (literally) under a command hierarchy. The tension, of course, is that this strategic control always involves a tradeoff with the tactical, the ability of a group to respond on the fly, to emergent situations. For Krista-Lee, this effect was directly discernible -- while she enjoys soloing and quest-grouping, she felt lost in new instances, when there wasn't an explicit script to follow.
As I've pointed out, for WoW, this had -- before the expansion -- created a mutually constructive relationship between the 5(10)-person instancing and the large-scale raiding. While small-scale grouping not only allows for, it depends upon, tactical rethinking on the fly, large-scale groups narrow and leverage the set of available class skills (maybe hunters begin to leave pets behind, druids get pushed into healing, only one hemo rogue is called for) into more strictly-defined roles. The small-scale was, perhaps like boot camp in the military, an intense and necessary part of enculcating a set of competencies (what is a pull, sheeping, aggro), but one that ultimately is left behind, smaller in comparison to the institutional ambitions which these competent bodies now serve to realize. Rationalized systems of resource distribution, like DKP, along with political structures and communications tools, play a role as well for these institutions, harnessing individual desire into organizational discipline, to get the 40 people needed together all at one time, ready to down Onyxia, or tackle a world boss.
The reason I think this is particularly interesting for us to think about now are the cases of both WoW and Second Life and some of the recent changes these VWs have undergone. The downsizing of endgame instances in WoW, the availability of soloable loot roughly on a par with Tier 1+ in Outland, and (to my unsystematic eye) the prevalence of small group quests there with excellent rewards, all suggest that Blizzard's moving away from supporting the emerging institutions (guilds) of its creation, ones which had dominated server culture for pretty much the whole game. This is an interesting contrast with past TN conversations, like the one here.
By contrast, the revamped estate tools in SL (which I'm sure many folks out there know more intimately than I), increase the amount of governance by island owners not only over a piece of property, but also over a group of people, and in fact these tools have thereby become deeply intertwined. To my eye, this enables the generation of institutional players on the SL landscape that LL has never had to deal with before. I'm not thinking first of the existing external institutions with a "presence" in SL, but rather of those entities that until recently we could somewhat reliably continue to think of as individuals, but which are now better understood as institutions. While the relationship of LL to some of its major content creators has been undoubtedly cozy, one can't help but wonder how long that will last -- institutions are competitive. The interesting thing about Second Life is the extent to which Linden Lab has had a "free-ride" for a long time, effectively being the only large institutional player in the arena. Social convention was emergent from the users, and was (is) something with which to contend -- a lot of time at Linden is devoted to this "community management". But architecture, the market, and "law" (others modes of governance, as I see it) were all firmly in Linden's hands. That's changing now, and the question is whether Second Life will fly apart at the seams once these other institutionalized interests find their footing.
All this is really just to wonder whether we're entering an era where the relationships between virtual world makers and the people involved them are changing. It is probably wise for us to get in the habit of thinking just as readily about developer/(in-world) institution relationships as we do about developer/individual player relationships. I actually think this will be a hard habit to break -- the idea of the game maker/game player relationship as primarily institution-to-individual is just one instance of the engrained tendency for those in industrialized societies to think about social institutions primarily as they relate to individuals.
WoW and SL both demonstrate, at a very broad level, different solutions to the emergence of institutions within their creations, an emergence that was, I believe, inevitable once resources began accumulating within these persistent and contingent domains. Foucault, like Weber, thought that people banding together to accomplish something was fine, but was wary of what happens next. Once any nascent institution begins looking for something else to accomplish, its primary raison d'etre has already changed. At that point, it's more interested in its own reproduction than in its original aims or purview. Once that happens, look out.
[Addendum: Ever-alert Julian Dibbell points to ShaunConnery's Rapwing Lair. Surely the script in Krista-Lee's guild never sounded so good.]
For the last year I've been very involved with a guild in WoW that is beginning, it seems, to break apart (as so many do after their core members reach 60). I've had a fantastic set of experiences that were possible only in this guild, but their apparent loss leads me, now, to reflect a bit on the nature of social groups, trust, and games. (And, it's refreshing, by the way, to write something here shaped more by my point of view as a gamer than by my research interests.)
Perhaps (no, surely) this reflection is prompted by how highly sporadic "being together" as guild members currently feels to me, something that previously marked our activities on an almost nightly basis. It is interesting that, when people talk about how guilds change, and perhaps end, they often point to one external factor or another (like raiding alliances), and this betrays the assumption that the guild, left to its own devices, would do nothing but continue -- that social stability is the rule, and fragmentation the exception. I'd like to push at that idea a bit (actually, a lot), and I begin by asserting that there is nothing in what a "guild" (or similar social group) is that makes its reproduction a given, all things being equal. The solidarity, the trust, that a guild can generate is better understood as a fortunate and intrinsically fragile achievement tied to a specific kind of game practice.
Social groups, including those in games (and the gameness is relevant in a specific way, but I'll get to that further on), are founded and sustained out of shared experience; this much anthropologists and some other social scientists know. Changes in external conditions can affect that experience, but other factors can as well, including sheer changes in size, in the life circumstances of participants, and in changing member interest. Whatever the reason, once that shared experience is no longer achieved (or its prospects highly attenuated), then the fragmentation of the group is basically inevitable.
This is, of course, not necessarily a "bad" thing. As time marches onward, things (people, circumstances) change, and it's probably true that, as Six Feet Under meditated upon, those in Western societies (broadly speaking) are not very good at (accepting, participating in) such endings.
So far, so what. I'm sure that some version of this take on human groups appears unremarkable. But I would like to add in a few wrinkles, which pertain specifically to what a gaming environment means for the above. Consider, if you will, the oft-spoken of analogy of WoW and golf. Isn't it interesting that golf can be played by the same group of people for years and not necessitate that one or more of the group wants to move on? Sure, players may get bored with a particular course, and mix things up now and then, but a group will play the same course hundreds of times. I acknowledge, in anticipation of what I will say further on, that golfing groups are not always so marked by social solidarity; golf can be a means to an end, in which case opportunities to "move on" and play with a different circle, are strategic. It is also the case that, as I've noted before, golf as a social activity is reproductive of class distinction, and therefore what's going on, even for a small, stable group of friends who play for years, is not entirely innocent, when viewed from a broader perspective. But the point is that, for those small groups who do hang together through a game for years and years, it is, from their point of view, very much about the being together, and what is more, the gameness of the domain itself seems to be central to that.
So what is it that makes games powerful generators of social solidarity, and what is it about WoW that complicates that? It is probably not a surprise to hear me move to the contingencies that games generate for the answer. Apologies to Dmitri and Constance, but I think we can do better than pointing to categories like "third spaces.” We can, I think, begin to get at what is intrinsic to game experience and the generation there of trust and belonging. Here's my assertion: the shared and intimate experience of (complex) contingency is a powerful source of belonging and trust. My ideal type for this kind of shared experience is the small-scale, tactically driven, and “real time” mutual coordination demanded of a group that is gaming together. The size here is important; the group must be small enough not to trade off tactical improvisation for strategic organization. Each plyer must coordinate his or her actions with others, and they must do it not simply in a reflective, leisurely fashion, but on the fly, in an embodied and urgent manner; the goal is to be able to act and react as a group, ready to face any new contingency that presents itself.
Of course belonging can be generated in this way in the everyday. Crisis moments, interventions, accidents and disasters -- all of these can and do generate belonging and trust for their participants. But we do not have these opportunities all the time (and we don't necessarily want them!). Life is uncertain, in a broad sense, but much of our everyday experience is routinized and rationalized. We are rarely called upon to improvise in this intimate way with others in order to act. Games, however, are designed to put us squarely in that kind of situation. They are socially legitimate spaces for us to encounter contingency, whether alone or with others, and it's frequently with others that we do it. Interestingly, in games like golf (or bridge, or bocce, or any other game entrenched in cultural practice), the game itself is not designed to change; it is essentially the same over time. And this is probably important, I would speculate, because comparing performance through time (either between players or in considering one player's changing competence) can be a great source of meaning. I think this is what draws many gamers with existing offline ties to make WoW guilds or similar in the first place -- we want to capture the immediate and contingent (protean) feeling of being together in contingent circumstances, something like the frisson that applies when an atmosphere of intense possibility brings those involved closer together.
So, what happens with WoW? As a far more complicated game than most which occupy this space in society, WoW not surprisingly doesn't work the same way (and, it is important to note, it wasn't designed to) as golf. Instead, WoW (and games like it, including most pen and paper RPGs) is a deeply modernist game, one might say, because of the centrality of measured and artificial progress inscribed in the architecture. The acquisition of competence in the game is architected to such a high degree that, while I certainly gain performative competence (in how to move, type, aim, click, etc), much of my progress is folded into hard-coded changes in abilities (skills, levels, until 60). These stand as simulacra of competence, but are really credentials, authorized by the institution that is the software itself. The contrast with a game like golf is remarkable (where similar proxies for competence are restricted to handicaps and technology, like better clubs). This point bears repeating. While small-scale grouping in the complex game that is WoW can be powerfully generative of trust and belonging, the level system works against this by making credentials stand in place of player skill. This means that the shared experience which underwrites groups in WoW is very fragile, because it is not possible when two or more players are at wildly different "stages" in terms of these changing credentials (not coincidentally, in my opinion, disjunctions between player competence and toon credentials are a continual source of meaning in game, such as in the relationship between one's gear, guild affiliation, level, and displayed performative competence).
Nonetheless, the existence of the ladder until 60 provides a shared framework which can anchor, if a group adopts a level cap, shared experience to a great degree. Think about how much those around the same level are thinking about the same quests, the same places, the same gear tradeoffs, the same increasing complexity of their interface, etc. Most importantly, this gets them all experiencing things together, especially when they're in the same group. And they often want to be, because they need to get to the same places. The shared and intimate experience of the contingencies of an instance, realized in grouping (again, at small sizes, where tactics are still important enough not to be sacrificed) lies at the core of meaningful social (as opposed to individual) experience in WoW, and therefore performs much like the golf analogy would suggest. But by being a skeleton around which shared experience can form, the level system (and any cap linked to it) has already sowed the seeds of its own demise, because it cannot be in place forever.
Also, all along, of course, consumption has been inscribed into the game, in the form of items, many of which are soulbound (and, therefore, are indistinguishable from temporary, elective skills/abilities). Once L60 is reached, that system flourishes; items become the new levels. But items, unlike levels, are tied to specific places, and specific kinds of gameplay, and therefore their single-minded pursuit takes players in different directions. After 60, the styles of gameplay (solo, small instancing, raiding, bg) multiply and, most importantly, it is no longer feasible for a group to impose anything like a level cap. The seeds of treating the group as a means, rather than an end, were there long before, but now find full flower as players come to realize in practice (if not in discourse) that their only chance to continue to "progress" is through acquiring (specific) loot (which itself has very clear gradations). This is such an overriding concern that players will willfully sacrifice the powerful experience of small scale and tactical grouping amidst contingency for the large scale and less intimate (because more bureaucratic, strategic – I’ll leave this aspect for another post) experience of raiding, driven all along by material desire.
So what happens to trust and belonging? They begin to vanish. Not because allying with a raiding guild was ill-advised, or because people's interests changed, but instead because the ladder of progress both built that solidarity and then, by shifting wholly from horizontally and universally-shared levels to loot, broke it. I suppose it would have been possible for WoW to have written the game without raiding, making harder and harder 5 (and 10) person instances until they could only be done through perfect execution. But this would have alienated many players who simply would never have been good enough to advance to the end. By changing the post-60 advancement to raiding (and BG), an almost wholly new set of competencies become involved, which allows for the illusion of one grand yardstick of competence that simply isn't there.
In short, belonging and trust are very fragile things, made even more so by a game that keeps changing its "rewards". We should not, I guess, be surprised that the game ultimately makes its players choose between treating their guild as an end in itself, or as a means to an end, and that too many choose the latter to sustain belonging. But I will be disappointed by it nonetheless. Anyone up for some golf?
Dave Elfving (of Machine Chicago) pointed me and others to this insurance commercial ("The Lord of Mishap"), which he first saw on television. Take a look and come back. I'll wait.
Clearly, you're in good hands with gamers.
But how did we get here? This is an industry (insurance) widely known for its conservatism in marketing and its focus on, above all, playing to its potential customers' desire to feel safe and secure. Isn't it remarkable, then, that we've reached a point where a long-established insurance company can reasonably expect to gain customers by saying, effectively, "You shouldn't worry if you've got Farmers insurance, because gamers are standing by"?
Is this an index of how far gaming has come in the cultural imagination? It seems to me that we are in the midst of a transformation where the hallmark of frontline competence in business and technology is moving away from an engineering-style application of linear rationality to solve problems, and toward the application of the embodied, improvisatory, and multiple competencies that games instill.
But there are other interesting questions. Is this shift primarily generational, an attempt by Farmers to reach younger customers? Or do we think that this kind of appeal has broader reach? That is to say, how widely is gaming competence coming to be seen as the kind of competence you want on your side?
Also, does this reflect more a growing idea that gamers' competence is what we need in a technologized environment (since we assume all of our long-term customer-corporate relationships are deeply technologized)? Or is it deeper than that, reflecting a growing cultural tendency to see the world, technologized or not, as a game? In this vein, note how the commercial draws upon its audience's gaming competence as well, in the game-like interface that overlays the suburban setting, and which provides the first clues to what's really happening to the poor Lord of Mishap. Marketing always aspires to get customers to identify with a product's providers, so apparently not only are gamers standing by, they are also white-picket-fenced home owners and minivan drivers, and it makes perfect sense to them to liken everyday mishaps to the appearance of an otherworldly menace wielding arcane powers on Maple Street.
My guildmates and I in WoW are an unstoppable force, able to mow through furlongs full of Furbolgs crying "Strength and Honor!" all the way. Well, that's not quite true...While we have every reason to believe that we can pwn Sunken Temple (aka The Temple of Atal'Hakkar), we have been thwarted time and time again.
Are we too low level? Nah. Do we have poor leadership? Certainly not (as long as I'm not leading). Are we not geared properly? Please -- this is a guild where members know the WoW Auctioneers on a first-name basis.
No, the problem is a Blizzard of technical obstacles.
Yes, we've heard about authentication and post-patch problems. Those have become the natural state of affairs. But this week we were foiled in our assault on ST for two different technical reasons. The first time, one of the six mini-bosses essential to the Shaman L50 quest, was just...missing. Not there. And of course he was the sixth one we went after.
But it was our second obstacle which got me thinking about WoW and its prospects. Last night, we were foiled because of the billing problems that Daniel Terdiman over at cnet covers in his blog here . Monthly credit card-billed customers with bill dates on April 20th and 21st -- like me -- were unable to log in because the automatic billing hadn't charged their cards. Blizzard's work-around (calling the account department, or re-entering your billing info via the account management page) were quickly inundated with requests and pushed out of commission themselves.
So while I futilely sought to access Blizzard's Account Management page, my guildies and I chatted about all of this over Teamspeak last night. Apart from blowing off steam about these continual problems (all the while imagining Blizzard's devs blissfully unaware as they take their Maseratis out for a spin), we wondered whether this is simply growing pains of the largest MMO ever, or whether there is reason to believe that the problems will be more sustained.
Could it be that WoW's demands, due to its sheer unprecedented size, not only on Blizzard's own game servers, but also on all the (I assume) third-party vendors/providers that handle things like authentication and, now, billing, are going to continue to push the limit for the forseeable future? (This recalls, by the way, Second Life's own recent challenges with scale and the increased threat of attacks, one of which knocked the whole world offline this past week.) Do we think that the presumable bump that comes with the expansion pack will exacerbate this problem?
Assuming Blizzard is internally, and properly, panicked about these problems, and are therefore doing everything they can to solve them, then is these problems' persistence a sign of a structural problem -- that WoW's scale and the size of its user-base make demands that the third-party support vendors have never had to cope with before? We didn't happen to have one of our serious tech-heads on TS with us for this conversation, so I'm raising it here. How much of a threat are the problems of scale for the virtual worlds that reach such size first?
With a 0.550 batting average for 2005, clearly I wasn't reaching enough with my predictions, so for 2006 I'm going to live a bit more on the edge. Without further ado, 10 fearless predictions for 2006:
1) A winning candidate in the 2006 US Congressional elections will have campaigned in an MMO or virtual world
2) Apple's share of the PC market will double to 5%
3) Second Life's peak concurrency, currently at 5000, will reach 20,000
4) WoW will end 2006 with fewer players than it has today
5) Peter Ludlow won't send me an autographed copy of "Only a Game"
6) A Second Life resident will begin selling a service for exporting SL items to a Fab Lab (such as Berkeley's Squid Labs) in order to create them in the real world
7) A Virtual Research Foundation, based in a virtual world or MMO, will be created to gather games and virtual world research, create research standards, and provide funding to researchers
8) The US Democratic Party, in an attempt to capture the "family values" vote, will demonize games during the 2006 election cycle
9) A business or service in a virtual world will successfully file for a trademark
10) A Terra Nova author will testify before Congress about virtual worlds
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?
I first brought up this idea back in the heady days of 1989. The general consensus among the dozen or so developers I approached was that we didn’t need one. Two further factors were the cost, and the suspicion with which developers regarded each other.
With the legal system chipping away at developers’ autonomy, reliance on press releases and hearsay for performance comparisons and the benefits of sharing blacklists becoming increasingly apparent, is the time yet ripe for the formation of an Association of Virtual World Developers? Or are we still too disparate, disjointed and untrusting of one another to make the call?
Corollary: if players really do regard developers as arrogant, unsympathetic, power-abusing fat cats, why don’t they form a trade union?
Richard
As an update to the post on the Accelerating Change Conference readers might like to listen to some audio of the roundtable conversation between Brian "Psychochild" Green, Jamie "Gaming Open Market" Hale, Daniel "Three Rings" James, and Steve "IGE" Salyer. The moderaterateror is our very own Cory "They like to call him "Linden Labs" but we call him "TerraNova"" Ondrejka.
Also on the same site, you can have a listen to Bill Gurley's massively multi-player market talk from O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Conference.
It seems pretty inevitable. If you cruise around the MUD Connector you will find lots of ghost towns out there. I'm sure many of us have experienced a world or two closing in the past, but more commonly they seem to hang on in some diminished way. The recent announcements about further server mergers in EQ prompts me to wonder lately about downward trajectories. There are a lot of fascinating details to be dealt with (duplicate names, character limits) and things that will arise from the change, not the least of which will be seeing how two server communities negotiate now living on the same block.
We have a lot of stories about vibrant communities online, but it'd be great to have more reports about when networks fade, when people leave, and what exactly remains. Of course, one of the interesting things that has happened with past worlds is that sometimes groups of users swoop in to salvage or recreate - often on a smaller scale - their beloved spaces. I'm don't mean to overstate this and suggest EQ is going to have the plug pulled anytime soon. But having seen Bristlebane when it was so big it had to be split, the pending merger admittedly leaves me a bit nostalgic. So I'm curious, what does the death of a world look like in the MMOG-age?