Welcome to the Morgue

This is the archive of all my old postings, interviews, columns, etc. The feetofclay.us archive was recovered from bloglines. I'm going to paste in the old interviews as well, if the original hosts mind they can let me know and I'll pull them down and substitute a link, *if* they will send me a contract promising to keep the original up and/or to provide me with notice before they delete it.

It's not that I think that what I've written/said is particularly worthy of preserving, just that it's a series of snapshots of my state of thinking about online games. I find it useful to go back through it and reconsider it, and I hope that others will as well.

f13 Interview, September 2007

Originally posted to http://www.f13.net/?itemid=618

It was reading this that made me realize I needed to take drastic action to salvage my career. I was saying many of the same things I had said the year before, even to the Kangaroo Jack reference, and I was forced to admit that I hadn't really moved forward either professionally or intellectually in the entire time in between.

I had co-billing with Scott Jennings on this one, we were getting to the end of the show and the f13 guys were going to have to catch their plane so they doubled us up. Me and Scott worked together at Mythic, he was the one I'd go and bitch at when I didn't like the direction Camelot was moving. We had a good dynamic going in this interview, and Scott was very gracious at f13 adding me to an interview that was originally supposed to be him alone.

AGDC07: An Evening with Dave and Scott
Commentary , Blogosphere , Rants , AGC'07Posted by: yoru @ 15:27:20 on 11/12/07



Towards the end of the last Austin conference, F13.net was lucky enough to snag a dinnertime interview slot with two of the more interesting figures in modern-day online game development: Scott Jennings, formerly Lum the Mad, and Dave Rickey, formerly of a lot of places. As neither Dave nor Scott were able to tell us about their upcoming titles, we instead did was we must, because we could: ask random questions and then try to keep out of the crossfire.




F13: So, we're here at a Mongolian barbecue restaurant with Dave Rickey and Scott "Lum" Jennings...

Scott: Don't you have a cool name?

Dave: Mahrin Skel, but what the hell.

F13: Everyone knows you as Dave anyway, it's what you sign all your posts with.

Dave: (chuckles) Yeah.

F13: So, what got you guys into the industry, what attracts you to the game industry in general?

Scott: Insanity.

Dave: It's show business for geeks. I mean, you've worked as a programmer. Did you know any programmers who didn't at least occasionally mention how they'd like to work on games?

F13: Very few.

Dave: Well, I was a programmer working on insurance rating software and inventory control systems, and I kept thinking "Gee, I really wish I could work on games!"

Scott: And I worked on databases and wrote a whiny blog.

F13: And which whiny blog was that, Scott? I think some people might not have heard of it!

Scott: And I think it's probably better they remain without that knowledge.

Dave: Thank God for web-rot.

Scott: Yeah, really. The only people who hit me up about my old website now are other game developers, it's kind of eerie. The memory of the internet is measured in microseconds.

F13: Jumping back, Dave, how did you get into the industry?

Dave: Okay, I was playing UO, and right after UO came out, I had a really bad car accident. I mean, like, month in intensive care, the whole works. Major life altering experience, I just realized there was not enough money in the world to keep doing work that bored the shit out of me. I had to do something more interesting. Right about that time, the buzz for EverQuest was picking up, I got active in the community for that, ran the EverQuest Vault for a while. I made connections inside the team and actually got a job as the assistant junior wannabe-head game master on EverQuest for Verant. And then I just kinda never looked back. I did that for about six, eight months, then I went to work for Mythic, and then I went to work for Mutable, and then I went to work for Orbis, and here I am!

F13: Scott?

Scott: Pretty much the same thing, but with different names, and like I said, there was a whiny blog in the intervening time. Basically, I was a database programmer who was woefully underutilized in my job, so in between being the human load-balancer for NT Support servers, which meant that I basically watched them and waited for them to bluescreen so I could hit the reset button.... Needless to say, this was not a constructive use of my time, so I spent a lot of time writing for my whiny blog. This was way before blogs became vogue, so writing for my whiny blog meant typing into an HTML page and uploading it to the internet. It became somewhat popular among the internet microframe group of users who played MMOs, which at the time were one, and then eventually two. And then the Dot-Com explosion happened, and the company I was at decided they couldn't afford to pay people to watch NT servers bluescreen any more, so I posted to my whiny blog "Holy crap, I'm unemployed, heeeeeeelp!" One of the people who read that was Matt Firor over at Mythic Entertainment, who said "Hey, doesn't Scott work on databases? We need a database guy. Maybe we should talk to him." So they did, and I packed up my entire life and moved to Fairfax, Virginia, and the rest is, well, not quite history but something of the sort.

F13: Collectively, what's your favorite project you've ever worked on? Why? ... Uh-oh, Dave's got a look on his face. Out with it!

Dave: Both favorite and least favorite.

F13: Sure!

Dave: I really, really had a lot of hopes for Wish and what we were planning on doing. And I was really, really disappointed in how things turned out.

F13: Why?

Dave: Well, one, because I worked on it for like seven months, we were barely started getting the stuff I wanted to do in there, and then I couldn't do it any more. And then they went on auto-pilot basically following the designs I had laid out but not calling it by its right name, for another year, and then, just kind of, it died. Moral of the story, never work for manic-depressive Germans.

Scott: What about manic-depressive Americans?

Dave: Eh, at least you speak the same language.

Scott: So in my case, the favorite project I've worked on is the one I'm currently working on, which I can't talk about at all. The reason why it's my favorite project is because it's my first chance at actually practicing what I preach, working on design. And, for some insane reason, they're actually entrusting me with coming up with all the systems design of the project. The nuts, how the game works, basically.

F13: So, how have you dealt with the transition from engineering to design?

Scott: Well, I've always been an armchair designer from back before I worked at Mythic. I mean, my entire whiny blog was basically armchair design, so it just moved from armchair design to full-chair design, I guess.

Dave: They let you design in a driveway.

Scott: Yes, they let me design in a driveway. Most people at MMO companies are frustrated designers, because design is where the cool stuff happens. Design is where you actually get to talk about gameplay and you don't have to worry about things like plumbing and how you're gonna keep the servers up and where you're going to host the database servers and things like that. It's more like the cool stuff that you actually worry about when you're off-duty and are actually playing the game you were actually working on for the previous twelve hours. And in my case, it consists of typing into a wiki a lot and pointing at other people and saying "Hey, tell me where what I'm writing is full of crack." I'm not getting a whole lot of comments on things that are full of crack, so I'm hoping we go public soon so the general public at large can tell me where I'm full of crack. I have great faith that the internet will tell me, precisely, how full of crack I am. ... Including, probably, people at this table.

(laughter)

F13: So, if you had to name three people, who would you say are the three people you look up to most in the design world, and why?

Scott: You first or me?

Dave: I'll take this first. Will Wright. I mean, probably saying the same things that everyone else puts in their top three. Definitely Will Wright, he gets the good drugs. I want some of what he's having. A lot of times Peter Molyneux, although he can get a little out there sometimes, follow an idea further than he really should. It's really hard to name a third. I'll just pass to Scott at this point.

Scott: Oddly, my list is completely different from his. First on the list is Richard Bartle, not only did he invent this whole beast, but he still has a lot to say about it, which is very interesting and usually very much on point. Oddly enough, when you think about this stuff for twenty years, you start to come up with some conclusions. It's a crying shame that he's not actually involved in a live MMO at this point. Somebody needs to hire this man, I keep saying this, I'll say it again, I'll keep saying it. Another one would be Raph Koster. I know everyone loves to bash on him, especially message boards and people who've played his games and what not. But say what you will, the man thinks deeply. He treats MMO design as a very serious challenge, he gives it the gravity that it deserves. He's responsible, more than anyone else, for pursuing MMO design as an academic discipline and as something that can actually be taken seriously. Third would probably be Shigeru Miyamoto, simply because he was the first person, the first game designer, who came up with the concept of "Hey, I'm gonna make fun stuff." Everything Miyamoto makes is fun, everything Nintendo makes when they're hitting all cylinders is fun. That's why the Wii is kicking everyone's butts right now, because it's fun! It's not the highest-level tech, it's just a repurposed Gamecube basically, with some cool hardware, but it's the cool hardware that makes it. They actually looked outside the box and said, "Hey, let's have people wave things around!" and stuff like that. It's just another way of thinking, basically.

F13: You mentioned treating game design seriously. What do you really mean by that?

Scott: Well, most people dismiss games. Most people dismiss... Okay, it's games, we're going out and we're gonna make D&D On-line, no offense to the actual D&D Online, we're not gonna think too seriously about this, we're gonna slap together some monsters, slap together some levels, put together some quests where we kill ten rats for the rat skins, because there's an inexhaustable series of people who apparently want to buy rat skins...

Dave: Beyond that, I mean... Game design is an art, but it should also be a craft. In any art, there are matters of technique. There are things that work, there are things that don't work. There are things that almost work that you do just because it's "artistic", and that's when things start to fall apart. But the point is, we're nowhere near that phase. There's a lot of matters of pure craft and technique that we still need to learn, and Raph is one of the guys who's working really hard at establishing what those issues are.

F13: Just what are some of those issues, by the way?

Dave: Just for starters, his whole game notation idea. It's an attempt to have a way of talking about games that doesn't describe them in terms of other games. Some objective reference system that isn't just pointing this way and that way...

Scott: "It's like WoW but with chimpanzees!"

Dave: Exactly.

F13: Now, you were also working kind of in that space, you've retreated in your Miyamoto Musashi manner to make games for girls. So, what are your feelings on treating design seriously, then?

Dave: Well, yeah, I mean... I think you have to. We don't know what it is, but we know it's very important. Games live or die based not on tech, but design. We are not in the technology business, we're in the entertainment business. A competent movie director can take the stupidest idea you've ever heard of, Kangaroo Jack anyone? And make a watchable movie out of it.

Scott: Kangaroo Jack was watchable?

Dave: I didn't turn it off. It was the number one movie when it was out. The point is, why can't a competent game designer take a laughable or even stupid game idea, and make something at least playable out of it? The fact that we can't do that is an indication of just how primitive our craft is. So, I was trying to figure out how to make games for people who are as unlike me as possible: 13-to-30-year-old women.

F13: So, what have you discovered over the past year, since we last spoke with you?

Scott: That he is, in fact, a 13-to-30-year-old woman.

Dave: I've gotten in touch with my feminine side.

(laughter)

Dave: No, I mean, seriously, that women do think differently than we do. And you have to be unafraid to confront stereotypes, because there's always a grain of truth at the bottom of the stereotype. I won't name specifics, because that'll get me, "Oh, you're just a male chauvinist pig, blah blah blah blah..."

Scott: Oh, I'll name specifics all day. Women are guild leaders. Men are PKs.

Dave: Women are... At the head of most powerful in-game organizations, you'll find, generally, a man-woman team. Not necessarily in a relationship, but it'll be the man that leads and the woman that is the glue that holds everything together. Almost without exception.

Scott: Women tend to be community leaders, because women tend to assume a nurturing role, whether they want to or not. And I've talked to some women who absolutely despise being thrust into the nurturing role, but they get pushed into it because they're the den mother, they're the woman. Men, on the other hand, seek to have pretty explosions, they seek to destroy. Now, of course, I'm wildly generalizing. There are plenty of female PKs, there are plenty of male guild leaders. But when you speak of stereotypes, you speak of generalities. And generally speaking, when you look at large guilds, at the core of them there's a woman somewhere.

F13: So how do you exploit these psychological tendencies, then, to draw women in as an audience?

Dave: Well, again, don't be afraid to confront the stereotypes, but don't be afraid to kick them out the door either. Women are not necessarily casual players. I told the story last interview that we did, about how my mother is hardcore at bridge and backgammon and other games played online. She puts in thirty, forty hours a week playing these things. That is not casual by anyone's definition. But everyone says, oh, but Club Penguin is casual, CyWorld is casual. If you look in there, you don't see a lot of people just putting in the five-minute game experience. They're binge-playing. They'll play that game hardcore for a week and then move to a different game. The point is, women are different in what they're looking for in their game experience, but in their actual playing habits, they're not all that different. They want a game that is fully going to engage them and is going to give them an additional life on top of the one they already have.

F13: Now, is that a matter of different mechanics, or different subject matter?

Dave: Subject matter... can be very critical. Mechanics can be critical. Women do not want to go in, in general, they do not want to go in with big guns and blow up things in huge showers of gore. There are always exceptions, but this is just general. They're much more interested in building things, in managing things, in the social environment that grows up around all the rest of this.

F13: All right, since you mentioned it earlier, where do you fall in the spectrum of considering that games should be art, or that games should be entertainment?

Dave: Yes.

F13: Yes. Explain?

Dave: Games should be art, games should be entertainment. Movies can be both art and entertainment. Movies that try to be pure art tend not to be very entertaining. Games that try to be pure entertainment tend not to be good art. What's the problem? We just need to figure out what that spectrum means for games.

F13: What do you think?

Dave: I think we're going to see a separation. We're already starting to see it with the serious game movement versus the sequelitis you see in the mainstream. And, how will it sort itself out? It probably never will. We'll still be arguing about it, just like we do with movies, we'll still be arguing about it when we're in our seventies. It'll be... it's just not going to happen. The more we know, the more questions we're gonna have.

F13: So, how do you get your research data? You found out a bit about the gaming habits of women and girls. Did you just have to iterate? How did you approach that?

Dave: Well, fortunately, I was able to start working off of what my business partner had already put together with [Virtual Horse Rancher], which was really... The core of VHR is all hers. I mean, she built it just because she wanted to play it, and then a bunch of other girls wanted to play it. It's just a matter of... you have to watch. It's a lot of cultural anthropology. You try to observe without embedding... without influencing. You spend a lot of time being there but not letting them know you're there, or at least not that you're watching. And you see how they play and what they do, and try to infer from that why they're doing it. Because, if you ask them, two people who play exactly the same ways for the same exact goals will give totally different reasons for why they're doing it. Asking them their motivations is the worst way to find out.

Scott: My personal target audience is me. So, when I do research on what I like, I peep into myself and go "What do I like?" Seriously, Dave is very brave in making games for 13-to-30-year-old girls, I do not do that. I am someone who doesn't pretend to understand what other people want, other than myself; I make what I want. I try to watch out for what other people would want, because I realize that not everyone wants to play the penultimate Russian Civil War sim where everyone dies of dysentery. But at the same time, generally, we write games that we want to play. That's how we make good games, because we're gamers ourselves. We want to play good games. I'm in the MMO industry because I really love MMOs, I really love playing MMOs, I really get off on the whole global nature of connections that MMOs have basically invented in terms of gameplay. So, in terms of what research I do, and what people do, I read a lot of boards, I try to talk to as many people as possible, but, in the end, I can't rely on... you can't do market research on what a 12-year-old thinks fun is! I can only... when it comes to fun, in Orwellian Newspeak, it's bellyfeel. It's what you think is fun. And that's something that each person can only answer individually. Now, obviously, once you get the game made, you can do market research out the ass to make sure what you've made doesn't completely suck, but when you first start attacking it, you make something you think is fun.

Dave: Beyond that, there's the old anecdote about Isaac Asimov going to give a presentation at his college about one of his stories, and the students absolutely insisting that he was totally wrong about what the meaning of his story was, and what did he know, he was just the author! And there is something deeper there. Just because you thought you were making a certain game, that's not the way everybody's going to play it. They're going to find fun in things you put in there just because they fit into a hole.

F13: So, how do you go about finding that fun then?

Scott: Finding fun?

F13: Yes.

Scott: You mean do I go out on a corner and look on a street corner...

F13: Yeah, do you root around in the trash like a hobo?

(laughter)

Scott: I guess you're asking how do you first design a game that is fun?

F13: Yeah, what's your work process like?

Scott: Well, my work process is, I start from a very vague outline of what I want the game to be and what I want the game to accomplish. Usually involves writing an executive summary. Completely theoretically, if I had to describe to the CEO of the company what I'm spending millions of his dollars on, then, you know, it's a two-page executive summary of what I want the game to be. Then you drill down to the various parts. You want combat? Okay, what is combat? How is combat gonna work? How are players gonna fight each other, ARE players gonna fight each other? Do you want crafting, if so, why? If not, why not? How is that gonna work? And you keep drilling down. Now, the problem with doing nothing but drilling down is that you lose sight of the fun, because then you're basically micromanaging every small part of it. So every so often, and this is really the lead designer's job, or the producer's job if the lead designer isn't doing anything, basically, someone has to step back and take the bird's-eye view and say, "Well, what is this game, what are you doing? If I log in, how am I going to spend an hour, what am I doing?" And, is it fun?

Dave: Where did the fun go?

Scott: Yes.

Dave: The infamous "I WILL TAXI TO VICTORY" screed? That was a case of somebody who completely lost track of where their fun was.

Scott: I had a lot of fun!

Dave: You had a lot of fun making fun of it!

Scott: Well, I was drunk.

(laughter)

Dave: But, no, they had a firm idea of what they were trying to make, but they drilled down so deep on what they were trying to make that what they wound up with what was a really rigid simulation that had taken most of the fun out for all but that hardcore grognard who doesn't mind spending three key-presses to line up a shot with his rifle.

Scott: Actually, they way they describe it now, it's seven. And apparently they posted that on their wall as an inspiration to the others.

Dave: (throwing up his hands) Okay!

Scott: So now we both have done that.

Dave: Cool.

F13: So, moving back around to something you started to say there for a second... What really inspires you to start making a game, to start designing a game? Where do you draw your ideas from?

Scott: Books, movies. When playing other games, thinking "oh, I could do so much better than that". Which, honestly, everyone does if they think more than five minutes about it. Everyone who works in the game industry has ten game design ideas in their back pocket. That's just a fact of life. And, you know, getting to actually pitch a game involves taking one of those ideas and refining it. But as far as where the idea comes from to begin with, just everyday life, you know? I was only half-joking when I said eventually I want to make a game about the Russian Civil War. That's a fascinating period of history that most people know absolutely nothing about. I mean, it would make a perfect MMO. There were many sides fighting each other almost completely at random, there was lots of drama, the Czar's gold being carried around on carriages, a Czech legion which was fighting for a nation which didn't even exist yet which was sent to Siberia for a completely different reason, there were three different Communist factions all fighting each other, oh and the Americans were there too but nobody knows about that because we don't study history. This would be a kick-ass game. But, it's a kick-ass game that I would enjoy, but would anyone else enjoy it? Probably not, unless they're a complete turbo history geek. ... Actually, I see a lot of people at the table raising their hands, which is kind of frightening me.

Dave: The problem you get, and this happens over and over again in this industry, is that we set out to make games for ourselves, and we compromise that to make it more marketable. Then we go to make the sequel, we have more authority, we make it even more like what we really wanted to make in the first place, and, in the process, refine down the available market. Maybe we get to do one more round, and the next round is something either so completely watered down and completely tasteless that nobody wants to play it or so refined that there's like ten people on the planet who actually enjoy that game.

F13: So, you mentioned movies and books. If you had to pick a passage or quote from a book, or a scene from a movie, what would you describe as your most inspirational or most influential on your design?

Scott: The scene in Return of the King, the book, where Eowyn is fighting the Nazgul lord, where Tolkien literally choreographed every blow of that fight. I mean, he literally had it in his mind. Eowyn raising her shield and having it shattered by the huge mace, and being knocked to her knees and all that. Reading that as a child, I was inspired. I wanted to be there, I wanted to pick up a sword and kick ass and fight alongside her. That was probably the most inspirational passage in literature I've ever seen in terms of gaming. And that's why we all make fantasy games, that kind of literature speaks to us. We all want to be that knight that kicks the Nazgul's ass. That's something that speaks to everyone, really.

Dave: I'm afraid mine has nothing to do with inspiration for what games to make, although it does sometimes affect the way I play them. It was a science fiction story, I don't even remember the name of the author, but the title of the story was "Stars, Won't You Hide Me." And it was all about... Basically, you have a human pilot being chased by alien pilots at relativistic speeds, time dilation... they literally chase him to the end of the universe, and because he managed to survive right to the very end, humanity didn't really lose the war. That was just inspiring to me. And sometimes, a lot of times, that's the way I'm playing a game. I'm not going to win, but damn it, I'm going to be the very last one to lose.

Scott: So reputation grinds are your fault?

Dave: Probably.

F13: You mentioned everyone wanting to be a knight or something like that... Now, I'd say a lot of games, at least in modern times, are based around that kind of adolescent power fantasy. Do you think we need to move beyond that kind of narrative in order to grow as a genre, or grow as an entertainment medium?

Scott: The problem with growing as a genre is that, remaining safe is inherently a safe bet. If you want to make a fantasy game, chances are good you're going to make some money out of it because everyone loves fantasy. If you want to make a science fiction game, it's a risk because less people buy science fiction games. If you're going to make a game about something entirely new, like history or the Old West or what have you, fighting in Ancient Greece like Perpetual's doing, that's a risk. It's not something that's been done before, and not only is it a risk to bean-counters and businesses, it's a risk to customers. Customers like the familiar. I mean, World of Warcraft sold nine million copies not because everyone was a Warcraft 3 fan, okay? It's because it's familiar, it plays on those familiar tropes. Everyone knows what an orc is, everyone knows what an elf is. Everyone knows that elves are stalwart and shining, everyone knows that orcs are bestial and they probably beat people with axes. These are narratives that don't have to be explained in great detail. You fill in the blanks. It's what I like to term narrative bandwidth. If you have a new story that you have to explain, then you have to have a lot of narrative bandwidth, you have to describe everything. If you're making high fantasy, you don't have to describe jack. You put an elf there and everybody knows what it is.

Dave: It's like, okay, you look at the movies from the thirties and forties, when they were just finally figuring out how to really make good movies. But you didn't have a lot of complexity - you had good guys, you had bad guys, you generally could always tell who was who. It wasn't until the fifties, and especially the sixties, that you started to see conflicted heroes, anti-heroes, the bad guy who reaches redemption in the last act. All of this kind of narrative depth didn't occur until both the medium and the audience had matured beyond the simplistic.

Scott: And, just to back him up, the game industry obviously is a young industry and it hasn't matured to that point. We're still making silent movies, especially in the MMO space. I mean, we're still learning how to tell stories. There's a lot of technical hurdles that we're still leaping in terms of just telling nonlinear stories. That's really hard to do. It's really hard to make a well-crafted story that millions of people can participate in simultaneously.

F13: We're still learning to keep servers up.

Scott: Well, I think we've got that down...

F13: I think you're both saying that the audience has to learn along with the developers.

Scott: Oh, absolutely, the market needs to mature, and the audience is a part of that.

F13: We've all learned what a bad guy looks like in a movie in the 21st Century, we can pick 'em out very easily, we all know what a movie is like. Do you have any ideas of what we can do in the game space, how we can help perpetuate this, help the audience learn?

Scott: A lot of that is sort of a meta-tutorial process. I mean, you train the user as part of the game process in what the story is. That's one thing that WoW does very well with their quests, is draw you in to their story, they teach you that, no the Orcs...

Dave: You want the meta-narrative on how you make more complicated good guys versus bad guys? Red vs Blue. Why is the Red side good? Because we're the Red side. Why is the Blue side bad? Because they're fighting us. We don't need any more justification, that's all that's necessary. We need more complexity than that, but that is a good start. It indicates that the players are ready to accept this absolute moral relativism, where everything is judged from where you stand. And that's the only important viewpoint, is where you stand.

F13: So, since we were bringing up stories in games, what do you think the relationship between a dense narrative, or a good narrative, and a good game is?

Scott: I think narrative has been extremely underutilized in games. I'm very much an advocate of narrative, I actually like to call it context. I like to think there's a reason things are happening. If I'm being told to kill ten wolves, I want there to be a reason to kill those ten wolves, I don't want it to be just because I have to fill the quest journal to get quest number 32 out of my journal and get five more XP. I want it to be because there's some reason the wolves are attacking the town.

Dave: And beyond that, I want there to be some resolution to it, beyond the fact that I get the shiny wolf fang dagger.

Scott: And then thirty people lined up behind me have to go kill wolves as well.

Dave: Yeah. We need to... people want to be at the center of their story, but they also want their story to have meaning. And right now we're not doing that very well. We're not giving their stories meaning except in their relationships to each other. Their relationship to the world pretty much remains unchanged because the world remains pretty much unchanged.

F13: What do we need to do to take steps towards that sort of thing? How do we inject that kind of context into a game?

Dave: Okay, well, as you know, I'm real hard-core on EVE lately. Lately being the last year and a half. Once you get out of the so-called Empire areas of EVE, everything is about the players. If the players didn't build it, it isn't there. If the players don't bring it, it's not gonna happen. Everything is about the interrelations between the players, their politics, their wars, their plans, their dreams. Yes, it seems pathetic, this is just internet spaceships, it doesn't really matter, except that it always matters, it's about the relationships, the relationships are always real, even if the world isn't.

Scott: Actually, the world is real, because it contains people and thus it is real. When you have the wars in EVE, you have the wars between Band of Brothers versus RedSwarm, GoonSwarm or whatever, those are real wars. Those are people who are fighting each other. They may not be literally picking up sticks and beating each other, but they definitely get angry enough that they just might. If you read interviews that people give, like that one that was posted on Shacknews with the Mittani, the intelligence weirdo with GoonSwarm, I mean, he is metagaming the metagame of the metagame! There's so many layers there that I don't think he knows where they are any more. How is that a part of the game any more? He's not part of the game, he is metagaming the community that has formed around the game. He is at war with another community, he is not at war in the game any more. Now, is that a bad thing or not? Probably not. He's having fun, the people he's playing with are probably having fun.

F13: That kind of overflow from a game into real life, is that something we should be encouraging? If so, how should we do so?

Dave: Everybody always reflexively says "No, we shouldn't encourage it!" because the first thing they think of is the street gangs that track each other down in Korea, guys from different PC baangs that track each other down and beat each other to a pulp.

Scott: Because nobody ever dies in Asia except because of an online game.

Dave: Exactly, we've got crime regardless. And yeah, there's stories about things that have happened in EVE, like people tracking down the enemy commander's address and going up and cutting the power to his house in the middle of a battle. Do we want to encourage that? Of course not. But on the other hand, the relationships are real. There's no reason why games should be any less a part of somebody's identity than music. Both are equally virtual, both are equally meaningless in and of themselves. Nobody thinks twice about describing someone as goth or punk or a metalhead or whatever. Why should we think twice about describing someone as a WoW player or whatever? There's no reason they can't be part of our identity. Right now, it's a niche activity, it's a little creepy. The stereotype is the guy who's in his parents' basement, with acne and 300 pounds.

Scott: It's handy to be demonized by politicians. I mean, no one has ever managed to do a political career off of "I'm pro-gaming, gamers are cool." No, instead, it's today's comic books, it's something they can safely say they're taking action against the cultural filth of America.

Dave: Hail, hail, rock and roll!

Scott: Exactly. History is repeating itself once again. Once you get gamers into the political process, and once you get gamers who are actual politicians, which is actually starting to happen... There's a legislator in Guam or something that's actually is high-level WoW raid leader.

Dave: When you think about the depth and the intricacy of the politics in EVE, and you think about the fact that the guys that are running these things are in their early or mid-twenties? And you think about what's gonna happen when these guys finally start running for office... How highly refined, compared to your typical congressional staffer, are their political skills going to be?

Scott: Yeah, they've had a lot of practice.

F13: So do you see the modern political focus on games as a social ill as a boon or a threat to gamerdom?

Scott: A threat, it's definitely a threat.

Dave: It's just that we're changing the social order. It's a socially-disruptive technology. Which is always scary. Old revolutions good, new revolutions bad. This isn't the same as rock and roll, rock and roll was just good wholesome music, and this is like, my God, the kids are actually in there!

Scott: The problem will be when you get clueless legislators that actually start making laws on things that they know nothing about. What happens if someone wakes up tomorrow and says, "there's too many people spending too much time in World of Warcraft" or "there's children being exploited in Second Life", or whatever? And then you have people start passing mandates, like they have in China, like you can only play MMOs four hours a week. And the company has to maintain that. Well what will happen is that the companies will shut MMOs down because it won't be cost-effective to maintain them in such a legislative environment.

Dave: When gaming is outlawed, only outlaws will game.

Scott: Yeah, BNetD will rise again.

F13: Okay, let me fire off our little closer here because we're already running pretty long. So, presume you had an infinite amount of time, an infinite amount of talent and an infinite amount of money. What do you make?

Dave: My own universe? I mean... at that point I'm God...

Scott: Infinite is pretty big.

F13: What I mean is, what's your dream game, what do you really want to make at the end of the day?

Dave: I don't know yet, I don't know enough about how to make games! I know what I would do as my next step is, do I know what I ultimately would make? I don't know what the limits are.

Scott: Yeah, I back that up. I mean, we're still figuring out how to make games, really. Everything is iterative, really. Players complain because there isn't the perfect game that comes out, there isn't a game that actually fulfills what everyone wants to play. Well, that's because we're still learning. And not only are we still learning, the businesses are still learning, they're still learning what's profitable, what we can do, what we want to do. I mean, WoW was a huge surprise to many designers, because it proved that massively parallel gaming was viable. By massively parallel, I mean people basically soloing to the end game. Prior to that, you had the EverQuest contingent which believed that if you didn't force people to group, the game would fail, because you wouldn't have social connections to form. Well, it turns out that people like playing their own little game in conjunction with everyone else playing their own little game, and within the world that springs up from that. So, we're still learning things like that.

Dave: At the core of it is the fact that we're talking about a social change in where people look first for their entertainment. For the last two generations, it's been television. If you had nothing better to do, you turned on the TV and found the least objectionable thing that was available. Now, if you're a gamer, what do you do if you have nothing else to do, there's nothing new on TV, nobody's going out tonight? You log in and start playing your game. That's your default leisure activity.

F13: Okay, any closing comments?

Dave: We suck.

Scott: He sucks. I rule.

F13: All right, thanks guys!

f13 Interview, Septeber 2006

Originally posted to http://www.f13.net/?itemid=281

This was done at AGC 2006, right around the time we were wrapping up VHR2. I felt flattered that Schild had decided to do the interview with me rather than the one with Raph. It wound up a hybrid of a normal interview and an email interview, the guys interviewing Raph had the recorder and Schild was typing our conversation into his laptop. Later we filled it out in email exchanges, I tried to keep it to what we had actually said but in a few places (mostly as parenthetical insertions) I went a little further.

Interview: Dave Rickey
Commentary , AGC'06Posted by: schild @ 02:37:40 on 10/16/06
While some other hooligans were sitting down with Raph, I sat down with Dave Rickey for a compelling conversation about the state of the industry, his work at Orbis games, Wish, the female gamer, where things are going, and his own life. After a long period of silence - mostly due to Eve and his day job (you know, that Game Designer Thing) - he's decided to start talking again.


Schild: So, WoW. With all of its polish and shine, it still doesn't hit all the bases. But in terms of visibility it seems to be getting the bulk of gamers. Sure, they're a loud minority, but 6 Million People Grinding is an insane amount of money.

Dave Rickey: I was in Damion's session talking a little about this. There's a tendency to think that the most successful game is doing everything right, that success implies virtue. Maybe WoW wasn't the perfect MMO, it was just a good game with a great brand. Blizzard slipped a lot of release dates and busted a lot of budgets to establish that, and WoW certainly did not tarnish the brand. I wouldn't say it's the perfect MMOG. It's a good game that hit at the right time and sucked all the growth out of the MMORPG market for a solid two years. Is WoW good? Are there incremental innovations in its features worth emulating? Yes, of course. And yes, it raises the bar. It's what Blizzard has always done. But everyone has gone into a state of collective shock, and they don't know what to do. What games do we make with 50-80M dollars? How do we even run a 50-80M dollar project? Where do we get that kind of money?

Schild: Which takes us directly into the rant.

Dave Rickey: Well, Scott said "quit doing stupid things." It was Lum the Mad in full form - and it was great to see. Everyone else was playing to their potential investors. And for a change you had Sony and NCSoft up there, also. It's not just people like Greg Costikyan and me just going "What the Hell?!" Part of that is because the barbarians are inside the gates, people who used to be saying that from the outside are now inside the big companies.

Schild: But what about Bioware? These people are well-funded.

Dave Rickey: They're not Blizzard. They've defined the western RPG since Baldur's Gate, and they're one of the stronger brands in games, but they don't have the global reach of the Warcraft franchise.

Schild: And what about their new blood? (Vogel, Schubert, Gordon)

Dave Rickey: It looks like they went looking for the best veteran talent they could find, it's not an unlikely pairing. These are guys who have known about each other for years, Gordon Walton goes back to the Kesmai days, as old-school as it gets. Myself, I've fallen into the gap of whether I'm the last of the old school or first of the new school.

Schild: Well, you obviously don't want to be the last of the old school...

Dave Rickey: The old guard dies but never surrenders. I don't have the credentials or track record to get the funding or brand backing like Raph or these other guys. But being "old school" leaves me with nowhere else to go. So I'm trying to go another way. I'm learning to make games for people who are not at all like me, finding my own answer to the question: What does it mean to be a game designer? What do you have to do to make a game happen? Twenty plus years of making team projects and we still can't explain what a game designer does.

Schild: And yet the same people keep getting picked to make these games?

Dave Rickey: Look at game design in general. People who consistently deliver critically and commercially successful products. Miyamoto, Will Wright, Sid Meier. Will and Sid have put out some bombs, sure. Even some of Miyamoto's stuff - but thankfully that hasn't come over here. But that doesn't seem to rub off, you don't see proteges of Will Wright or Peter Molyneux going on to become great designers in their own right on anything like that on a consistent basis. Whatever happens inside the mind of a good designer, it's a black box, even he doesn't understand it well enough to teach it to someone else. So all we can do is bet on experience, even if it's someone practicing their failures.

Schild: When I look at the 360, I see Sakaguchi, Itagaki, and others from Japan and what they're doing. They're focusing on the west a bit (in the case of Itagaki - a lot) more now. Is this a threat to the old school American folks? Can we even stand up to the old, old school of Japan? Anime isn't getting any less popular and that ridiculous type of storytelling that bombards you from every direction isn't getting anything but more popular. How long before a Japanese Company (Read: Nintendo) successfully abuses one of these licenses (Read: Pokemon) and blows everyone to Kingdom Come? It's only a matter of time...

Dave Rickey: And it is. Up until now we've had two markets divided by the Pacific. Almost none of that crossed. But those that did crossed in ways that are unrepeatable. We'll both learn more about how to make games, they'll learn more about making games, and teach us something in the process. When you try to make games for people that aren't like you, it's a totally different experience. It's totally different from making games you want to play. A competent movie director can make a watchable movie out of something that's completely foreign to him. It won't be a great movie, especially if the premise is ridiculous like Kangaroo Jack, but it will be watchable. Why don't we have game designers that can do things like that and make a playable title from an arbitrary premise that they themselves don't find interesting?

Schild: Which is a good place to talk about your company and what you're doing. Talk about the woman gamer, you've got a good amount of exposure to them with your new projects.

Dave Rickey: Don't patronize her. Just accept how she's different, in the end women are like men in only one important way, they want to play games that are interesting to them.
And to see how they are different, you can look at the handful of games they both play, and see how they play them differently, like The Sims. Women play with the virtual dollhouse part like little girls playing House. Men play like little boys torturing bugs. Generalizations like this can be useful, as long as you remember they are just generalizations. People think differently, and although there are definite general patterns to how the sexes think, over all, as a general rule, most men and most women as different from the gender norms as those norms are from each other. So making games for women becomes a more extreme case of making games for "people who aren't like me".

Schild: And your game? VHR? (Virtual Horse Ranch)

Dave Rickey: Yea, pretty much. The Idea of cars with big guns in Auto Assault resonated with many men. Pretty horses with pretty stables resonate with many women. Women care about the animals. They're so large and yet so fragile. To men, a horse is a tool - it does farm work. To women, well, it's more than a pet, it's like a child. But you have to deliver the gameplay that speaks to that resonance; you can't just make a silly game-like construct that happens to have horses in it but has the complexity of pre-school edutainment.

Schild: And how does that translate into the game?

Dave Rickey: They have their horses. They train them. They breed them to make better horses - chasing a particular attribute or breed pattern. Men don't understand this. Men look at these things and say "how do I win?" Breeding requires more than one person, it's not a competition. And it's not a "casual" game, it's a deep management sim, as complicated as your typical Fantasy Football system.

Schild: Ok, so take that non-competitive social mentality and mix it with WoW. And you get the golden question: "How can these ideas coexist?"

Dave Rickey: If I knew that, I'd be busy programming. There's no reason they can't coexist. I'm trying to examine how that works.

Schild: A while back you wrote that piece, MAISE, for us. And now people are talking about new types of gamers and such - like the "dormant gamer." What do you think of this?

Dave Rickey: Right now I'm working on something new that examines why things are fun and why our brain wiring says something is fun. I want to know why that happens.

As for the other papers, like the one that just came out from Parks Associates, the "casual gamer" tag was really artificial and with this they're onto something. The division was always arbitrary, how can a puzzle game played 20 hours a week be casual while 20 hours a week of WoW is hardcore? Is what they came out with accurate? It's probably a more accurate approximation than the artificial Casual/Hardcore dichotomy we've been using.

Schild: Speaking of dichotomies, what about the Bartle Equation?

Dave Rickey: The Bartle Equation is what MAISE was about. MAISE was about people in games pursuing goals. If you assume that they are a certain type of gamer who plays in certain ways, it blinds you to how they don't always play the same way. It's circular logic, they play this way because they have these goals, and you can tell they have these goals because of the way they play, it doesn't take you anywhere. If you assume they pursue goals that change, or that a different style of play may be a more efficient way to reach their goals, then a lot of apparently bizarre behavior starts to make sense.

Schild: I've been thinking about that aspect myself a bit. The hardcore and casual mentality end up being the same.

Dave Rickey: Well, the goals ARE different. The play IS different. But the end result... is the same. Just as it is possible to apply "rational actor" analysis to "altruistic" behaviors and show that a lot of "selfless" behavior can be explained as rational self-interest, you can apply "goal oriented play" analysis to some very fuzzy, meta-game goals and show that a lot of apparently undirected play behavior is actually goal-oriented. Does it take a lot of the mystique and romance out of it? Yes, and that's exactly why it's good.

Schild: Right, so there has to be a hook in the fallacy that these people are "different" types of gamers...

Dave Rickey: The fault is that people are thinking they always stay in the same category. Someone RIGHT NOW might be a hardcore PVP type. A few months from now they could be weeding a garden in Animal Crossing. Did they have a brain transplant, or did we fundamentally misunderstand why and how they were playing? It's just a matter of how we go about achieving the goal. My mother is hardcore, but for what?

Schild: If she's anything like the mothers I know... Spades, Mahjongg, Bridge?

Dave Rickey: Exactly. She'll kill 40 hours a week playing online Bridge and offline Mahjongg, and the traditional definition says she a "casual" player because of the games she plays?

Schild: You know, she's watching less TV now too. Touch on that, if you will, when did TV become the big competitor?

Dave Rickey: One of my two posts at Terra Nova was about how the LA Times was reporting on a disappearing TV audience and the Wall Street Journal was reporting about selling product placement to market at an emerging gamer audience. Hm, maybe there's a connection. Nick Yee's survey about playing revealed people who played more games, watched less TV, in an almost direct correlation. When a gamer has time on their hands they don't start channel surfing, they think, "What game can I play?" It's direct competition for mindshare with bad TV, reruns and pointless filler. And we're winning.

Schild: And yet, somehow, the vast majority of our games are rehashes. It's becoming homogenized. Much like TV. Especially in our tiny corner of the industry.

Dave Rickey: WoW caused a collective filling of the shorts. The costs jumped. The market jumped. How do you follow that? After a long period of shock, you go every which way. You go head-on, you go into different types of games, you run the opposite direction. You go Any Direction You Can. There's a lot more money on the table than we had ever realized. But the big-money projects are going to take the safest bets, make "WoW plus X" where X can be better PvP, a different license, whatever. And the big money will get the biggest press, so it will look like nothing is happening but more Diku-derived fantasy games. Then something will come out of left field and deliver even bigger numbers, and that will be the new thing to copy.

It's like back in the 60's when you couldn't get a new TV show approved unless it was a western, and we got The Rifleman, Branded, Gunsmoke, F Troop, Bonanza, Wagon Train, and so on. Star Trek had to be pitched as "Wagon Train in space." These things go in waves. At one point in PC games, it was hard to get funding for anything that wasn't an RPG, because all the big sellers were RPG's, and we got Bard's Tale, Ultima, Wizardry, and the SSI "Gold Box" D&D games. Now none of those survive other than as a label attached to an MMO. But the next big payoff will be something completely different.

Schild: Which is something I've been preaching since WoW hit, day one. And you've gone that direction. Some people have accused you of... hiding.

Dave Rickey: I've gone off the radar. Some reasons were personal, some professional. In my career I've been my own worst enemy. No one doubts my ability, but with my skills comes an irrepressible iconoclastic force of nature. No one feels comfortable getting cozy with that. Is that me anymore? You can't stay an angry young man forever. You have to decide whether you want to be the crazy guy on the street corner shouting at people, or retreat to the woods and find a better way. I took a period of withdrawal. I have a family and have contemplated what I want from my career.

Schild: And being on the outside has changed your perspective?

Dave Rickey: I've always been a student of examining behavior in games. Way back when, my real job was to write database apps and hit a big red button when something went bad, this took up about an hour and a half a week. The rest of the time I ran the EQ Vault. When I was in the UO beta, I looked at the energy and passion it created in people and wondered: Where does that come from and what does it do? And I still do that.

Schild: But it can go away too.

Dave Rickey: When I saw EQ come out and UO refused to die, it was the first indication that product cycle means nothing in this particular market. No MMO has yet died a natural death, they've all been stillborn or mismanaged.

Schild: Ok, but gamers play for fun. When that fun runs out, they do move on. Keeping subscription and churn in check is a tricky dance and once devs get stuck in a box or some vicious cycle, what happens? Just because we haven't had a full market cycle doesn't mean there isn't one. Most of the older games have been through several generations of staff by now.

Dave Rickey: The person who built it may not be the best person to run it. A vision will carry something into launch but it will eventually become a barrier, you'll keep trying to make it the game in your head, while the players want a better version of the game they have been playing, and those two visions may not have much in common. So the staff turnover may not only be inevitable, it may be neccessary.

Schild: Speaking of visions, we've now hit a generation of consoles where MMORPGs can actually happen.

Dave Rickey: It was an inevitability. But there are limitations right now - business model limitations. With the previous Xbox, you didn't have the resolution, with this one you can't count on having a hard drive, and the XBLive Arcade revenue model isn't friendly to third-party MMO developers. With the PS3 there are still things you can't count on, like HDMI. We're not quite there yet, but it is an inevitability that MMO's will migrate over to the consoles.

Schild: And for those people stuck in a box - they blink and miss a console generation.

Dave Rickey: Every designer is self-taught. If they cut themselves off, sure, they'll be playing catch-up. I had some of that leaving Camelot. I mean, balancing a 33, 39, now 45 class monster, it eats your life, you miss some things. Passion and obsession is a fine line.

Schild: Let's make the obvious segue here and talk about the PC and where it's going. Is it dead? Is it going to become a box for Valve titles?

Dave Rickey: The PC industry as we know it, is effectively running on momentum and has been for a decade. Inevitably, we'll probably see the big publishers get out of it, and fairly soon. The chickens have come home to roost. That doesn't mean it's dead. It will just never be the focus of what's "important", not the big money. MMORPGs are the PC's last hurrah. Calling yourself a PC Gamer once [MMORPGs] get moved to consoles will be like calling yourself a Mac Gamer now.

Schild: I can't help but think of the Wii with its mouse-like precision when talking about the PC industry. What're your thoughts on this?

Dave Rickey: There's this hardcore jaded element that looks at the Wii controller, and says "It's a light gun." It's like the mouse, joystick, and keyboard. They opened up possibilities. The Wii stick is a magic wand. It opens up possibilities. Games that we've never thought were possible will appear. Games that we thought shouldn't be on consoles will come to consoles. It will be a source of incredible innovation.

Do I know what they will be? No, but I can see the handwriting on the wall. There will be at least 3 genre founding games on the Wii that could not have existed before the Wii. Big as Doom. But the first thing we do with any new technology is do the old stuff with it. A little over a decade ago, people talked about how computers were going to create a paperless office and improve productivity, but then we gave those computers to people who measured their productivity in how much paper they generated. They became much more productive at generating paper, and we're going to do that same thing with games, trying to adapt the old games to the new inputs.. As for women, as mentioned earlier - well, there are lots of studies that say women are more tactile. Now we have an interface that is about how you move.

Schild: F13 is interviewing Raph in the room next to here, so let's talk about social spaces.

Dave Rickey: CyWorld is the closest to the MySpace of MMOGs. And yeah, you do not hold the same player for 20 hours a week for 6 months to 2 years because of gameplay. You hold them because they have friends where they are and they don't want to walk away from them. And only if the guild or corp or whatever moves as a unit or dissolves do they leave. These pure social spaces get huge audiences with just the social stuff and no game, or very little game. But they have trouble monetizing that, and they seem to burn out as fast as they appear, anyone remember Friendster?

Schild: So these people are doing something right and we're not doing that?

Dave Rickey: We're letting the game get in the way of the social experience, when the players use their social capital to get past barriers in the game, we say "you're not supposed to play that way" and we "fix" them. Games provide a directed user-experience and people need that. Then a time comes when the players want to step off the rails of the directed experience, and we don't want to let them. It's the Game vs. World question. But worlds are inherently larger than games. A world can contain a game but a game cannot contain a world. How can we embed a full game into a world without stepping on its worldliness, direct the player to the fun without interfering with the social interactions? This is a problem we must resolve with virtual worlds.

Schild: UO, The Sims Online, SW:G - they didn't resolve it.

Dave Rickey: It comes down to the player footprint. How wide can the effects of a
player's actions spread? If you're talking about EQ or WoW, it's the avatar and the range of attack. His indirect footprint is his vendors, auction orders, and his guild. It's a narrow footprint. Then you look at SW:G. Players have a huge footprint. You've got housing, pets, the market, and once you add all of that up, the players can have a huge impact on what seemed like a large world - which in turn proved to be quite small. Contrast this with Eve. Eve has a world that's so vast it's mind-boggling. 5,000 star systems, roughly 30,000 asteroid belts, 50,000 planets, 200,000 moons. 140K players fit right in and don't fill it even though they can have a large footprint. You have to find your own fun there though, and that's a very hard thing to do.

Schild: But how do you bring all of this together? The player having a substantial footprint but not upsetting the world - and multiplying that out - a minority of players ruining a world.

Dave Rickey: Eve gives hints. There is a directed experience. There are storyline and tutorial missions. It just needs to be better, do a better job of keeping the player entertained until he can find his own fun. You have safe areas, less safe areas, and areas where the only safety is in the power of the friends you have, and everything that is critical to the directed experience is in the safest areas. So you have this hint of a path to take the world and game and meld them into something that has the advantages of both.

Schild: But people expect a certain amount of freedom from these "sandboxes."

Dave Rickey: The effects you have in a single-player sandbox can be truly global. You don't have to worry about other people's experience. I've never finished a GTA, but I've played them and enjoyed them immensely. Eventually I get to a mission that's too damn hard and I just start playing with the sandbox. With SW:G each planet was 10x10 miles. Not even the city of Austin. The entirety of it, all 8 planets wasn't even the city of Austin, which isn't all that big. And then we got used to the standards of single player games. The world in GTA isn't bigger than SW:G. But when you have it to yourself it's huge.

Schild: And yet Nintendo, who nearly ruined Windwaker with its ocean travel, has bragged that it would take 45 minutes to get from one side of the world to the other in Twilight Princess...

Dave Rickey: We need to think real world big in scale. Not necessarily the globe, but at least small states and large counties. And then you have a problem with how you move around. When I was working on Wish, there were a lot of disappointments but there was one problem we had to deal with. How do people get around without teleportation? We had something of "ley lines" layout and put cities where the lines intersected on that system. There were seven points where twelve lines intersected. They would have been portals. You would never be more than 30 minutes (15 minutes to a portal, 15 minutes from a portal) from anywhere in the world. That's a worst case scenario, half an hour to get anywhere in a world of literally tens of thousands of square miles. But the important question is: How often am I going to have to cross the world, and how hard is it? In Eve, sure it takes an hour to get all the way across the map. But most of that is in Empire (safe) space, and you're not actually there while you do it. You're on autopilot. In low-sec you can't do that, but you rarely want to, either, most of your 0.0 adventures will be within 10 jumps of your base and you'll be using insta-warps for security.

Schild: Which brings me to one of my personal big talking points. Thirty minutes of walking or riding some animal? Why aren't we allowed to have fun? Not fun in the Munchkin D&D sense or Diablo - but the vast ocean that separates instead arcade style fun of yore and today’s modern MMOG?

Dave Rickey:It's about a directed user experience versus forcing users to make their own experience. There's a conflict there. It's hard enough of a problem for people to say "Forget about that, I'm making this single player, low multiplayer game, and calling it an MMO because there's a lobby with thousands in it." Like Guild Wars. Or City of Heroes, only the Lobby is really big (and itself can have multiple instances). And we're not ready to make worlds, really. I'm not making virtual worlds, I'm making games. I decided to practice my craft on games that aren't for people like me. Games that are fun for other people. Games that are something different.

Schild: Tracking back a bit - what did you think about what Jessica Mulligan has been saying - before, during, and presumably after the rant the other day?

Dave Rickey: She's afraid of another collapse like we saw in 1995-1996, before UO came out. So much smart money chases dumb ideas that the entire investment community just backs away for another decade. MBAs know business and they pride themselves in not needing to know a lot about the particular business they might be working in and supposedly professional management is the same wherever you are. This doesn't translate to gaming. The Entertainment Business. We're not a technology industry anymore.

Schild: Before we close up, I'd like to ask you about something no one really talks about. At least not publically. Central and South America. I personally know a decent number of gamers down there, and you know it's only growing. What do you think about this?

Dave Rickey: Nobody knows what to make of it. South America is off everybody's radar. There's this huge market down there that's desperately crying out for some love. "GIVE US SOMETHING," they say, and nobody is trying to give them anything. South America is easily as big and as easy to reach as Europe. How do you reach it? It's not like there's a shortage of Spanish speaking people in the U.S. Why hasn't anyone said screw this hyper competitive nonsense and made a decent game in a virgin field? You only have two languages. It's easier than going from Spanish to Portuguese than starting from English and then going to French or German. I don't think I'm the one to do it and have no idea why no one else has done it. It seems so obvious now.

Schild: It's time for dinner, give us some parting words.

Dave Rickey: I don't know. It's been interesting and I've been amused looking at this conference. They've been reacting to WoW and I don't have a dog in that fight. I can watch and be quietly amused. It's not that I've lost my passion but I've lost my anger. You reach a point where you're a hollow shell wrapped around your bitterness, or you give it up and move on. I've got as any horror stories as anyone else. You have to decide not to care. You can keep caring and burn out, leave the industry. Or you can stop caring about the bullshit and carve yourself an island of sanity in a sea of stupidity. When I jump back in, it'll be on my own terms. I want to expand my island of sanity to the point where it gives me a foundation to let me do what I want to do.

Game Design QA on RPG Vault, July 2005

I'm going to break pattern and just link to this one, as I was one of several people sent a list of questions about MMOG design, and I don't feel I should incorporate all of their responses here and don't feel comfortable editing it down to just my own.

RPG Vault Q&A

CorpNews Interview, June 2005

Originally posted at http://www.corpnews.com/node/76

This was done after I had spent most of a year trying to get funding for a Sci-Fi themed game called Polaris with Peter Friedman. We were just starting to get traction (we had commitments for several million dollars) when Peter started having some health problems. Word of these got out to the potential investors, and as they were really putting their bets behind Peter, that scuttled the project. Then I hooked up with Shannon Cusick and Orbis Games, bringing along John Arras (who had also been part of the Polaris project). At the time we were trying to get funding for Legendera, which was envisioned as a fantasy MMO set in the pre-Alexandrian middle east.

Catching Up With Dave Rickey
Submitted by Mr. Rasputin on Thu, 06/16/2005 - 8:20am.
Here at Corpnews, we sometimes get it into our heads to delve into our past a little bit. Occasionally try to catch up with people. We haven't heard much from Dave "Mahrin Skel" Rickey in a while, so I got together a few questions and fired them off.

He's been a busy little bee, but he answered every question.

Here they are, in their entirety.

Corp: Not a lot of info lately...How're you, what are you doing now?
Dave: I've kind of gone under the radar the last year and a half or so. For most of last year, I stepped back and took some "personal development time", after 5 years of focusing completely on games and my career, my personal life needed a lot of attention. I got engaged early in the year, I got custody of my daughter from my first marriage, and married in December. Being a parental unit (to my daughter and my wife's boys) has been a *major* learning experience that has taken a lot of my focus while I tried to figure it out.

So after 5 years of having no personal life at all, I flipped almost completely the other way for a while. During that time I was trying to put together a project called Polaris, a Sci-Fi based world centered on the theme of exploring a really novel alien world with extensive advanced AI, but it didn't come together. Then, in December, I joined Orbis Games as "Creative Director".

Corp: What's the new job like?
Dave: Interesting. After being part of three large projects, with 7 and 8 figure budgets and teams of dozens, it's actually a lot more interesting and challenging trying to see what can be done with a small team and budget. I used to be very dismissive of the small MMO companies, literally saying that if you couldn't front millions of of dollars, you shouldn't bother trying. eGenesis (A Tale in the Desert) and Three Rings (Puzzle Pirates) have proven me wrong, and I'm starting to see how small can be beautiful. With fewer people and less at stake, it's easier to explore ideas that would be too risky for a big project, and aim at niches that could never justify a large budget. When you're the tiny mouse wandering a field full of elephants, you have to go where they aren't, so innovation isn't just an option, it's a requirement.

Corp: Any ETA on seeing something about it soon?
Dave: Right now we're trying to build on our base, upgrading Virtual Horse Ranch into a graphical game, we believe that if the same gameplay the text game already provides was available in a more visual environment, it would gain a lot more subscribers. It's a totally different kind of game, with a totally different target market (95% of the current players are female), so just getting a chance to see the near-mythical "Women Gamers" in their natural environment is letting me learn all kinds of things that don't show up when they're a minority in a mostly male playerbase. We're hoping to finish the first stage of the upgrade by the end of this year, and give everyone a (virtual) pony for Christmas.

Corp: What was it like working on Wish?
Dave: Enlightening and frustrating. For the first time, I was involved in the issues that go with being senior management for an MMO project, rather than just observing. There's a lot of non-game factors that go along with running a business, leases for office space, insurance benefits, and so on, that I had never really been privy to before. Just planning our E3 booth was a complicated quarter-million dollar project in its own right. So I got to learn a lot about the nuts and bolts of management.

On the other hand, it was incredibly frustrating because I was just starting to see the fruition of my efforts on the design front when I left. When I came in, there were just a lot of things wrong with the way the game was put together. The way the character models had been built was going to require hugely more artist time to complete than could possibly be allocated, the skill system contained fundamental logical flaws that could never have been fixed, the scale of the world was such that without a *major* rethinking of how the world was built and populated, we could never have provided enough interesting content, just some deep stuff that had to be rebuilt before we could even start making a game.

If I had it to do over again, I would have tried to get some flexibility in our "Beta 1" launch date, we finished the refactoring of the systems in time but with literally only days to spare. There just wasn't any time to build content to make Beta 1 a fun experience, never mind do any internal testing, so what we had looked sloppy, rushed, and unpolished, even by the standards of an early beta. I was spending my Christmas vacation planning out how we were going to fix that before the end of Beta 1, when my boss called me and told me that I didn't need to bother. There was literally no warning, even my producer didn't have a clue it was coming.

Corp: Is it true you were let go from Mythic? If so, when?
Dave: At Mythic, I was always in this sort of odd, undefined state. I usually didn't have a job title, and most of the time I didn't really report to anyone, either. I used to joke that I was the "resident malcontent", but I think it would have been more accurate to have called me a "troubleshooter without portfolio". I had nearly infinite discretion about what I could look into or work on, but when it came time to involve other people or make changes to the game, I had zero authority. So I spent about two years running around putting out fires, trying to balance out the classes and realms, track down and eliminate bugs, get the feedback loop from players to developers to work a little more smoothly, and so on. As I'd find things and eventually convince management that we needed to do something about them, we wound up creating 5 or 6 new positions.

After Shrouded Isles, a lot of things came to a head. I had just done the best I could to balance out the 6 SI classes in 6 weeks (they came in one realm at a time, I actually only had 2 weeks for the last 2), so I was really frustrated with solving problems I thought could have been avoided. I was finally given an official status, as "Content Designer", which I was told meant that I was responsible for the instigation and management of all the new systems and large-scale content initiatives for the game as a whole. The actual "Designer" tag meant a lot to me, it had been my goal when I first got into the business, and even though I had been promised credits as a designer for the original box and the SI expansion, somehow they never materialized. So this was the realization of a major life ambition.

I was (and am) a firm believer that the most vital aspect of MMO development is information. We'd set up the Team Lead program and the Product Quality group, in order to better process the incredible deluge of information the players were providing us directly, and that had given us a great return. We were able to identify and fix a huge variety of problems and issues that were important to the players. The ones that were talking to us, anyway, and that was where I thought I needed to focus next: On the ones who weren't talking to us, but were just quietly slipping away, cancelling their accounts without raising much of a fuss. So I started doing a lot of data-mining, looking at everything we had in the character database for differences between accounts that stayed and those that left. I also pushed to get the ability to poll the players, so we could do exit polls and start getting a more objective and scientific set of feedback from current players, rather than prioritizing the "squeaky wheels".

After about 4 months of that, I became convinced that we needed to focus on improving and expanding our RvR game, as our unique competitive advantage. PvE wasn't why our players were coming, and too long of a treadmill on the way to RvR was losing us a lot of them. This put my "malcontent" status at a whole new level, rather than pushing for 1 or 2 new positions, a few days of programmer time, or the reorganization of a half-dozen people, I was essentially saying that the entire strategic direction for the ongoing development of the game had to change, and since TOA (with a total PvE focus and a new levelling system to be stacked on top of the old) was scheduled to come out in 7 months, the change had to happen right *then* if we were to put anything else on the shelves that Christmas.

It just created an untenable situation, I didn't feel I would have been doing my job if I didn't do whatever it took to make the team change tracks, while management apparently didn't agree that the situation was so urgent. I was "invited to resign", exchanged a fat severance check for a non-disparagement agreement, and moved on.

Corp: What do you think of ToA?
Dave: Did I mention the non-disparagement agreement? I can't really say much about TOA without running into it. At an analytical level, TOA was an attempt to make Camelot more like EverQuest 1. Hugely complicated multi-step quests to earn "Master Levels", that required the cooperative efforts of large numbers of people, doing them over and over again, and a new set of items that were bigger, better, and more shiny to collect. It was the antithesis of what I thought Camelot needed at that stage, as it added yet another treadmill that players would have to climb before they could be competitive in RvR.

Corp: Is the recent decision by Mythic to release an altered-rules server a good move for them?
Dave: It's an attempt to "unring the bell", roll time back to when the population of the game was a lot higher. When the 800 pound gorilla of WoW stomped a 2 million subscriber hole in the market for EQ clones, with a budget in the tens of millions, it became a lot less viable to try to compete directly with that kind of gameplay. It's potentially a good move, the question is if it is already too late. The current Live team has their work cut out for them, and I wish them well (I still have several friends working on it).

Corp: What are your plans for the future?
Dave: Build up the VHR community and income stream, continue to enhance and expand that game. Once that is well in hand, start looking for other unserved niches that can be tackled for a reasonable budget. Even if Orbis eventually has the resources to build a 9 figure megaproject (which is where the EQ model is headed), I think we'll stick to multiple smaller projects instead. There are so *many* possible MMO's to make, and I really believe that in the long run the current run of ever-bigger EQ clones will burn itself out. Once every potential player has already played one to the point of burnout, we'll need to do something else.

Corp: What are you playing RIGHT THIS SECOND?
Dave: Right this second I'm playing "Game Designer Image Enhancement (B List Edition)". But for video games, I've been playing God of War. I haven't been a fan of the console beat-em-up action-adventures, but I think this one has converted me.

Corp: What direction do you see the MMOG industry moving in the next few years?
Dave: The big news is going to continue to be EQ clones. Fantasy themed clones will get ever more insane budgets and continue to be the biggest games. We'll see more variation of setting, like we already have seen a little of, EQ with guns, EQ in space, EQ in giant robots, and those games will dominate the middle third of the market, running a step behind the fantasy games on budgets. The bottom of the market will run the whole rest of the range down, and is where we'll see the real innovation. The economics of MMO's under the standard business model are pretty simple: For each $1M invested, you need 10,000 subscriptions to pay back the initial investment in a reasonable period (2 years, investors have a different definition of "reasonable period"). A game that costs $5M to make and maintains a 50K subscriber level for 5 years will make an overall return of $7.5M (assuming 25% is skimmed off the top for the investors). A game that costs $50M needs half a million subscribers to do the same trick. Somewhere in there, anything untried starts to look like an unreasonable risk.

But this math works *better* at a smaller scale. A team of 3 investing sweat equity for a year and getting 10K subs for 5 years will clear over $1M each, over paying themselves reasonable salaries and hiring a few CSR's. Smaller teams have less overhead, fewer management, less inefficiency in communication, less effort wasted on office politics. 10K is only a tiny, *miniscule* piece of the market, the US/European market is around 4M right now, the bottom 10% of that could support 40 such games. And I think the overall market will double at least one more time in the next few years, probably twice.

It's somewhat disappointing (but predictable) that games that don't hit or approach the biggest subscriber numbers ever are seen as unworthy of notice by the mainstream gaming news outlets. Hell, EQ2 is seen as a failure because it was only the second-fastest growing MMO in the market. UO is written off even though it quietly sits there and generates $30-40M in annual revenue, after 8 *years* on an engine that wasn't new then. But more disappointing is that so far we've seen few signs of an "alternative online gaming" movement, that ignores the blockbusters in favor of the smaller games. If such a culture could gain some momentum, great things could happen.

I and the rest of the staff at Corp would like to thank Dave for his time and energy. Good luck with VHR. I think there's great things ahead.

"Fascism is Fun" on Terra Nova

Originally posted to http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2003/11/fascism_is_fun.html

The other posting I made at Terra Nova. After this one, we started Wish beta and I didn't have time, then I got fired from Mutable and started my long silence.

Nov 23, 2003
Fascism Is Fun
Dave Rickey

In all of the debates around governance and virtual worlds, there has been this assumption that what we were working towards, what inevitably must happen, is some ideal form of egalitarian pluralism. Democracy, but better.

What if that's all wrong? I realize this is heresy, but here's the thing: We've bent over backwards to provide the players with the tools for creating democratic structures. Yet what have we seen them actually create? Oligarchies, plutocracies, cults of personality, tribes, cartels, militaristic feudalism, just about everything but democracy.

When I posed this question at State of Play's "Society and Games" panel, one member of the panel was obviously non-plussed. Having just pitched the concept of a pure social game, where the players would create the rules and be truly free, she was asked "What if the players choose to implement a fascist state?" Her response was that she would not allow it, thereby illustrating the "finger on the power button" principle in its starkest form. Even the egalitarians cannot put down the reins of power.

But I'll pose it again: What if democracy, although apparently a workable way to keep the state from trampling on the rights of individuals, is just a historical accident, a way of marketing the power of the state that makes it easier for the governed to accept their powerlessness? What if studying the societies of MMOG's proves this? What if the ideal state really is the platonic benevolent dictatorship?

Hitler was a madman, but there was a reason that the German people followed him: He provided a strong arm, surely steering the ship of state. Mussolini was not mad, and until he failed them by losing, the Italians loved him. He made the trains run on time, he forged order out of chaos, he made them strong among nations for the first time since the Roman Empire.

Perhaps there are better ways to make a state responsive to the needs of the governed than democracy. It's certainly a highly inefficient form of government, and only rich societies seem to be able to afford more than the thinnest veneer of democratic forms to hide their real power dynamics. Perhaps our idealogical blinders are preventing us from seeing the glaringly obvious: Power is its own justification, Might Makes Right, and people just want to be on the side of the winners.

Even in this era, we have examples of enlightened, benevolent dictators. Marshal Tito kept the Balkans peaceful for the entirety of his life while playing the superpowers off against each other. Singapore has as complete a despot as can be found, yet the people are healthy, happy, and for the most part wealthier than most of their democratic neighbours. And in online games, maybe Fascism is Fun.

"Have you seen me" On Terra Nova

Originally posted at http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2003/10/have_you_seen_m.html

At the time Terra Nova had barely gotten started (the word "Blog" was only recently coming into common use, in fact). The concept was that it would be a group blog, with a mixture of authors from both academia and industry. At the time I had my own blog, the Skotos column, and PR duties for Wish, and I only ever made two posts there. Since I wrote this, Nick Yee's Daedalus Project ran a survey showing my core theory was correct, MMO playing time comes almost directly out of TV time.

Oct 28, 2003
Have You Seen Me?
Dave Rickey

From the LA Times:

Where did everybody go?
One month into the new TV season, overall audience levels have taken a hard tumble from those last year. New shows have sputtered, and scores of established series have slipped in the standings. Even some of the biggest hits - "Friends," "ER," "Survivor," "CSI" and "Monday Night Football" - have lost millions of viewers.

Network executives can't explain it.


For the first time ever, overall television viewership is down from one fall season to the next, the biggest shock to hit that industry since the Nielsens showed that cable networks were significantly cutting into the market for the big broadcast networks. But this time, nobody seems to know where they went. Even more troubling, the biggest drop was in the most coveted viewers:

One demographic group, in particular, was noticeably smaller: young men. The industry is fretting as 8% of men ages 18 to 34 have apparently sworn off television this season.
"It's hard to buy into the explanation that all of these young men suddenly decided to stop watching television at the same time," said [Lloyd] Braun [ABC Entertainment Chairman], who speculated that a factor for ABC could have been two lackluster "Monday Night Football" matchups.


18-34 year-old males are the most desirable audience for TV because they are the last, best hope for advertisers wanting to influence brand choices, that demographic controls a disproportionate amount of the disposable income, and if you can "brand" them, they'll likely stay with the same products for the rest of their lives (when they will control an even larger chunk). So this slippage is a deadly threat to TV and advertising's bread and butter, these are the eyeballs they have contracted to deliver. This year alone it may cost them hundreds of millions of dollars in refunds and rebates to the advertisers, if November "Sweeps" fail to deliver the numbers the networks promised.

Hmmm.... Hundreds of thousands of 18-34 year old males stopped watching TV, where have I seen something like that before? Oh yeah, they're over here, the bulk of the customer base for MMO's comes from exactly that segment of the population, putting in 20-25 hours a week in patterns remarkably similar to those of television viewing. That's not to say that our kind of MMO is the sole cause, this year's dip may have as much to do with XBox Live as with EverQuest. But I am morally certain that it is due to online gaming, and it looks like the TV industry may have a hint of that as well:

"They're not putting on a lot of shows that might appeal to a 25-year-old," he [Brad Adgate of Horizon Media Inc.] said. "These guys are probably doing something else - playing video games or surfing the Internet or reading Maxim.
For a long time, TV programmers and the viewers have had a deal: They'd put out shows, and we'd watch them. They'd put out less of it, and we'd still watch it. They'd put in more commercials, and we'd still watch it. "The Honeymooners" actually only ran for a single year, but back then a "season" was 39 episodes. By the time Star Trek ran for three, a "season" was 26 episodes. And this year, a full "season" worth of a show is 13-18 new episodes, the rest of the year will be filled with re-runs and pre-emptions. The episodes are shorter as well, down to a 44 minute "hour" (which may get "stepped on" by local affiliates or cable companies for the loss of another minute). Even by strictly objective measures, the quality of TV programming has been dropping steadily for a long time.

But they've been getting away with it, because TV's real customer isn't the viewers, but the advertisers. Actually producing new shows is an overhead cost in the process of delivering the eyeballs, and every business tries to minimize their overhead. Since how much new entertainment they delivered didn't have much to do with how many eyeballs they could deliver, it was only logical to spend less on it. After all, where were you going to go? There wasn't anything new to watch anywhere else, either. And now the chickens are coming home to roost.

This seems to be my week for playing Chicken Little, but this is a far bigger potential threat than anything academia alone might do. Samuel Clemens advised "Never engage in a war of words with anyone who buys ink by the barrel." We may already be in a fight with an industry that has their own satellite-beamed presence in every living room in America. If TV starts viewing these games as a competitive threat to their bottom line (and I'm pretty certain we are in the long run, those gaming hours have to be coming from somewhere), this will get to be a very bumpy ride. Nobody is "fair and impartial" when they think you're picking their pocket.

Stratics Interview, October 2003

Originally posted at http://www.stratics.com/content/interviews/wish/wish.php

Interview With Dave Rickey, Wish Creative Director

Beyond being the largest MMORPG ever created, Mutable Realm's 'Wish' offers a robust and highly unique system of player guilds and organizations. To learn more about this aspect of the game, we sat down with Dave Rickey, Wish's Creative Director.

Wish's guild system is very different from other MMORPGs, in that there is more than one "stage" of a guild. Can you explain briefly how the system works?

A Guild is what we've come to normally associate with a term, members of a Guild have their name, a common chat channel, support for officer ranks, permission structures, a Guild bank account, etc (basically everything a Guild can do in most games). The Houses are Guilds that have chosen to take settlements back from the forces of chaos and barbarism and re-establish civilization, they are responsible for the safety, management, and well-being of their domains, and in return they receive tax revenues. It is entirely possible that most Guilds may never choose to become Houses, confining themselves to PvE and trade activities without tying themselves down to a particular piece of land. We'll have a full game for these players to engage in, but even for them the activity of the Houses should make the world a more interesting, exciting place.

How did you come to think of this idea for Wish?

It's a combination of several ideas that have been floating around for years, in some ways a revival of some of the original aspirations for these worlds from the pre-UO days. We had high hopes of in-game governments and political/economic intrigue, that foundered on problems in basic gameplay. Now we're ready to move beyond pure hack-n-slash environments and make some of those hopes real (or virtual, as the case may be).

How was the "House" System inspired?

In essence, by pre-Charlemagne feudalism. The feudal lords were responsible for maintaining order and peace, and although they would frequently fight, the barbarian tribes were always in the background, a threat to whoever over-extended themselves. So most battles and wars were fought only to the point where it was clear who *would* have won, actually fighting to the finish would have left both sides too weak to stand off the barbarians. This was the period that the chilvalric codes and tournaments of the late medieval era were meant to be emulating (so the SCA and similar groups are actually imitating people from the past imitating people from *their* past).


The term "House" came from a discussion about the Drow (from Dungeons and Dragons), where the upper-class Drow each belong to a House, involving complex politics, assassinations, etc. How has this been translated to the world of Wish?

I actually didn't remember the Drow reference, but was looking more to what was probably the source material for both of us: The "Game of Houses" of medieval politics. How this translates is largely up to the players, the economic systems of the game contain the seeds of both cooperation an conflict. Suppose that your town has lots of metal mining and refining, and the prices of metal are very cheap and this has made your town a popular location for players to buy equipment. But other players, seeing cheap metal in your town and higher prices in another town, start buying your metal and selling it elsewhere, driving up your prices and chilling your trade in finished goods. You'll have the ability to restrict sales of metal only to the members of your House and the merchants you trust, as a sort of protectionist trade policy. But the House of the town that was receiving your metal may have liked both the tax revenue from the imports and the cheaper metal in their town, and be willing to go to war with you over your change in policy.

What kind of membership levels would you estimate that a guild would need to become powerful enough to turn into a House?

At this point I'm really guessing at that, but if things work out as I would expect the smaller towns could be held by a guild of 20 players, while the really large ones would need in excess of 100. Perhaps a smaller House that had a high proportion of really motivated members could take and hold a large town, it's hard to say. Maybe a really shrewd diplomatic policy could allow a very small House to avoid war while paying PvE Guilds to maintain security against the monsters. That's part of what makes the concept so interesting, that it depends on the capabilities and desires of the participants, which are inherently unpredictable. There isn't neccessarily a "right way" to play the game, more that there's a set of goals, threats and obstacles to those goals, and tools to use to try and achieve them. Some of the tools are going to hinge on your capability to be effective leaders and protectors for your domain, rather than your ability to patiently jump through hoops on your way to Uberness.

Will moving to become a House be a major event for the server? How much of a different change will becoming a House be for a guild?

How major an event it is will depend on a wide variety of factors. The physical location of the settlement, the resources in the area of it, the political climate of the server and the nearest neighbours, the strategic goals of the new House, and many others. There will almost cerainly be an in-game announcement of the accomplishment, how much further it goes depends on more factors than can even be predicted. Settlements vary considerably in size, as well, and that has economic consequences, the taking of a 5-building hamlet in Outer Podunk won't be nearly as far-reaching in consequence as the recovery of a 30+ building town right on the trade routes.

Once a guild becomes a House, and has taken over a city or village, it becomes the permanent leader of that establishment. Why have Mutable Realms decided that Houses cannot be displaced from their leading role?

They can be, but not by direct action. Rather, if a House stops maintaining the safety of their realm, the hostile NPC forces will take it back. The reason for this is simple: If you and your friends have spent thousands of hours developing and sheparding your domain, having a much larger House come in and burn it to the ground would really suck. Winning is important in PvP activity, but if the losers are left with nothing when the fighting is over, that isn't going to be any fun for them. Eventually, when they've beaten *everyone*, it isn't going to be a lot of fun for the winners, either.

On the other hand, if a guild has died in all but name, with only a few members still around, the town falling into disrepair, and monsters constantly wandering the streets, there needs to be a mechanism to reset things and allow someone else with more ambition a chance to try their hand. The monsters will constantly be probing at the recovered settlements, trying to find a weak point. Even if your House never goes to war with another House, you'll need to look to your own defense.

Being part of a House will open up many more opportunities not previously available. What kind of things will players in a House be able to do?

Oh, flog the peasants, squeeze the local merchants, argue trade policy with other Houses, the usual. :)

Seriously, the plan is to try and turn over as much control of their domains as is feasible. In addition to taxes and wars, the Houses will be able to delegate control of the shops to other players, who aren't neccessarily even members of their House. This is more than simply renting out space, more like a Royal Charter. Being designated as the operator of the Armorsmith shop would give you the license to do business as an Armorsmith, selling both to players and NPC's in the town. You might choose to further delegate, granting other players permission to use your forge and fill your orders in exchange for a cut of the profits or regular fees. You wouldn't neccessarily be a member of the House, but you would still be affected by the results of their trade policies, so even though you wouldn't be fighting you'd have a stake in their success.

You'll be able to hire NPC guards to handle the boring job of maintaining a town watch, manage the business of your town, and we hope be able to commission capital improvements for your domain (better roads, walls, watch-towers, etc.). There's a great deal of potential in what we can do, the hard part is trying to sort out what's *really* important in order to make the players feel their land is really theirs to protect and that they have the tools to do so.

What kind of systems will there be for trade in between Houses, and also Guilds?

Trade is definitely medieval in character, in that the biggest barrier to trade is simply moving the physical goods, and the next biggest issue is finding a reliable trade route that allows you to sell high and buy low. Houses will be able to determine who is permitted to buy and sell what within their domain, essentially a liscense to conduct trade in those goods. Who they give that permission to, and in exchange for what (and what smuggling and intrigue occurs), is where the interesting stuff starts.

Is it possible for a House to rule more than one establishment?

One House, one Settlement. A single house can only have a single settlement, in order to keep one Uber-House from dominating the choicest locations. Theoretically a Guild could split off splinters of itself to control more towns, but once they spun them off they would inevitably develop their own character and agenda.

Would stating that a House is a stationary Guild be accurate, or is this an over-simplification of the system?

Definitely an over-simplification. A house might be thought of as an "Advanced" Guild, that has gone a step beyond gathering Phat Lewts and moved into a higher political/social realm. A House's members aren't really any more stationary then those of any other guild, it's not like by claiming this territory and opening up this new gameplay that you're closing off the rest of the game.

Are there any further thoughts on Houses you'd like to add?

Uhh, they're the greatest invention in online games since we put pictures in them? :) Seriously, I think they're a logical next step in the direction of making worlds where the players actions *matter*. I think they represent an alternative to the impermeable environments of most existing games, and a different direction from the stampede towards "Instance Based" content that in the end has to wind up all flash and no substance.

What happens and how it is resolved is primarily under the control of the players. Our plan is to provide the potential for conflict and the tools to deal with it, and let the players create and live out the story of who does what, to who.

RPG Dot Interview, July 2003

Originally posted at http://www.mmorpgdot.com/index.php?hsaction=10053&ID=660

This interview came only about a month after I started at Mutable Realms, in fact I think I had been asked to do it before I even moved down to Huntsville.

Wish Interview
Wouter "Hyrrix" Ryckbosch, 2003-07-22

Wish is an upcoming mmorpg currently in development at Mutable Realms. They call the project an ultra-massive multiplayer RPG, because of the size of the world and the large number of players that should be able to log in on the same world together. Set in a medieval fantasy world, the game focuses mostly on questing and little on PvP. Dave Rickey, the lead game designer of Wish, took the time to answer our questions concerning Wish.



MMORPGDot: It seems like every developer studio out there wants to make a mmorpg all of a sudden. However, we all know that ambitions and ideas alone don't make for a good game, experience in creating large-scale network systems is very important. Whereas we see that games like Shadowbane suffer from great lag and performance issues, Mutable Realms promise to offer place for ten thousands of people in one single persistant world. Where did you get the experience to deal with all this and what is ZeroC?
Dave Rickey: Personally, I worked on EverQuest in a minor capacity and as a world builder and designer for Dark Age of Camelot. The rest of the team is a mixture of folks from various disciplines, some of whom have worked on games and others who worked with ZeroC. ZeroC is one of our software partners which develops the Internet Communications Engine (ICE), a software library that we use for our core distributed network architecture. Our server is built on top of that to support the demands of an MMO server in a highly scalable fashion.

MMORPGDot: And what about the financial position of Mutable Realms?
Dave Rickey: Mutable Realms is privately funded by direct investment from some of the founders. We’re fully funded for the duration of the projected development cycle for Wish.

MMORPGDot: Will there be one single epic storyline in Wish, or should we expect several separate story arcs? To what extent will the storyline have an impact on the players and the player community? And the impact of the players on the storyline?

Dave Rickey: The ongoing story of Wish is going to be what the players make of it. The setting is roughly that civilization has recently suffered a great catastrophe, and much of the world has fallen to barbarism and chaos. Recovering control and establishing peace and order is going to be the ongoing process by which the players shape the world.

MMORPGDot: Wish is completely skill-based, with no classes whatsoever. Will skills get better by using them or will you have to increase your skills by spending training points you receive at each level? Are all skills going to be combat-related or can we expect some other things too?
Dave Rickey: Wish has very different approaches to Combat vs. Non-combat activities, although both are based roughly on "Learn by doing". Those skills that have a direct impact on combat are divided into groupings based on the core archetypes of fantasy (Warrior, Cleric, Mage, and Rogues), and within those groupings the player chooses what to make the focus of their character. For example, if you choose to follow the Cleric’s Path, you’ll have a choice of development in Blessing (buffing spells), Harming (debuffing), and Healing. Warriors will choose what options to emphasize (to make a plate-wearing brawler vs. a dodging magic-using hybrid, among many others), and so on for Mages and Rogues. No single player will be able to master all combat roles, but within the limits of the archetypes what roles your character fills will be for you to direct.


Outside of combat (and there’s a lot) the player is able to choose with little restriction from economic (lumberjacking, mining, etc.), knowledge (of weapons, creatures, etc.), or tradesman (armorcraft, weaponcraft, etc.) activities, without affecting of or dependance on their combat capability. One key wrinkle is that there are limits to the amount of gain you can get from any particular activity (making X item, hitting Y monster, cutting Z type of wood), so you need to switch up your actions rather than just grinding through the same thing over and over again.

MMORPGDot: There are currently 7 races (Humans, Orcs, Elves, Halflings, Dwarves, Gnomes, and Cyclops) planned for Wish. What effects will the choice of race have on the character? Just different skill distribution, or will there be other special abilities that are race-specific?
Dave Rickey: This is not yet fully determined, the current thinking is that race will affect the speed with which you learn various skills or improve your stats. Dwarves may find it easier to learn smithing skills, and Elves be faster learners in the creation of magical items, just as an example.

MMORPGDot: Is there anything you could tell us yet about how the economy will work? Will there be crafting, and if so, will players have to gather their own resources?
Dave Rickey: There will definitely be a heavy emphasis on economic structures and incentives, this type of thing is an area where I have experience and I’m really looking forward to using the economy to provide greater depth of gameplay. Crafting and resource gathering will definitely be important parts of this.

MMORPGDot: Will it be possible to enjoy your time in Wish and making a character without engaging in combat? If so, could you give us an example of a non-combat related profession that you would find fun to play?

Dave Rickey: Myself, I’m looking forward to the chance to be a Toolmaker, which will focus on apparatus of all kinds from picks and shovels through the components of magical equipment. We certainly hope to provide enough depth to the crafting and tradesman gaming style to make it worth playing Wish for these alone.

MMORPGDot: How important will Player vs Player combat be in Wish? Are you focusing mainly on large-scale PvP or on small conflicts between individual players? Will there be any form of player politics and city/keep sieges in the game?
Dave Rickey: This isn’t ready for discussion of specifics yet, but PvP is definitely going to be a significant thing in Wish, significant not only in the amount of it that occurs but in the importance of the results. We believe we can structure it in such a way that although totally opt-in and not an imposition on those that choose to stay away from it, it remains attractive and significant for those that do. Yes, that’s a tall order, but we believe it can be done.

MMORPGDot: Quests are bound to be very important in Wish, with some quests reaching truly epic proportions. How do you plan to keep those quests interesting for everyone? Will we see other things than the usual "run that way" and "slay that beast" tasks? If so, could you give us an example of an interesting quest objective?

Dave Rickey: This is an area where it’s very easy to promise too much and deliver too little. We are working very hard to make Wish quests novel and interesting, but getting too specific now would be dishonest.

MMORPGDot: Is Wish mainly group oriented or will it be perfectly possible to solo throughout the game? Will it be possible to go questing with several players together, since that is a large part of the game?
Dave Rickey: Wish is intended to be very socially oriented, but through carrots rather than sticks. We’re trying not to say “This is your box, here are the people that will share your box, now play *this* way.” Rather the intent is to let you make the character that appeals to you, and to make your way in the world each session in whatever way appeals to you at that time. You don’t group to get faster advancement, you do it for more security and opportunity, or for friendship, or because the other player compliments your playstyle well.

We intend to make it possible for characters of radically different levels of combat power to freely adventure together, each contributing as they are able and receiving gains in accordance with their contribution. Your newbie buddy may not be able to do much more than chip off a couple of scales on the Dragon raid, but he won’t feel like he wasted his time and you and your other friends won’t feel like he took more than his share.

MMORPGDot: Will there be a number of rare and unique items to be found in the world of Wish so that players can go on item hunt?

Dave Rickey: Certainly. What’s the point of risking being toasted by the Dragon, if not the hope of getting lucky and using his hide to make a cool set of armor to show off?

MMORPGDot: What's the secret behind your absolutely awesome pathfinding? *g*
Dave Rickey: We have enlisted a domain expert in pathfinding that has worked with us for over a year to integrate a cutting edge pathfinding solution with the Ice architecture. This allows out pathfinding to be done by systems that are specifically optimized for the purpose.

MMORPGDot: How do you personally see the future for mmorpg's?
Dave Rickey: I think that we’re going to see increasing emphasis on the social engineering side of them, building game systems to ennable and shape the communities formed by the players. To make the actions of the players carry more of an impact on the world. Ultimately all of the art, gameplay, and technology exists to allow people to meet and do interesting things with other people, and games are going to get better and better at doing that. Certainly the technology will continue to advance, and taking advantage of the latest gee-whiz features of sound, graphics, and connectivity will be neccessary, but that alone will not let a game find a playerbase in this increasingly competitive market.

Thanks go out to Dave and the rest of the Wish-team for giving us the opportunity to do this interview.

gamebunny interview, December 2003

Originally posted at http://www.gamebunny.com/classic/wish_int.htm

Wish Interview with Dave Rickey, Lead Designer

by David 'spridal' Moore


Mutable Realms' Wish is an intriguing animal. Billed as an "Ultra Massive" MMO and promising that "Unlike existing MMORPGs that confine players to a server with only a few hundred other players, Wish's highly-scalable server cluster infrastructure allows us to support tens of thousands of simultaneous players in a single shared world." - we are hopeful that the game will deliver on its promise.
Join us now for a decidedly un-wishy-washy chat with Lead Designer, Dave Rickey.


gamebunny:
You must be excited and perhaps a bit nervous about beginning beta. It’s only been underway for a week, but have beta testers surprised you with their in-game actions yet and have any changes been made due to user feedback?

Dave Rickey:
Quite a few things, on both counts. The players are already taking towns, which is happening much sooner than I expected with this number of people, and organizing to clear roads between the towns. We've gotten the expected feedback on game systems which has led to some changes, but we've also gotten ideas from them for things like letting them hook into our HTML-based Help system with their own game guides, maps, and such.



Tell us more about your “Unique” skill system. How is it different and better than other games?

Dave Rickey:
The two fundamental differences are the flat power curve (some someone 10% higher in their skills is only 10% stronger than you are, with no exponential multipliers involved), and the Action/Target pairs that underlie skill gain. You can only gain so much skill from performing the same kind of action against the same kind of creature, you reach a point where you need to go try something else, either use a different skill or fight a different creature. This encourages the players to explore, and look for new challenges. It also opens up making different creatures behave in different ways, in the traditional XP system players always naturally gravitate to the encounters that offer the best effort/reward ratio on XP, and anything that makes the monsters smarter makes them not worth the trouble. With our system, there's always an incentive to take on those more challenging encounters.

Can you elaborate on your NPCs (a pet peeve of mine is stationary, unrealistic NPCs.) Will they move around and interact well with players in meaningful ways?

Dave Rickey:
Most NPC's have a routine they pursue, in the case of shopkeepers this may be as simple as just wandering a bit inside their shops, checking their stock, looking out the door, etc. Others, like farmers, will move between their homes, their fields, and various shops. The intent is to make the towns feel more like living places rather than just false fronts.

We're hoping to give the monsters considerably more appearance of purpose and goals than has generally been the case in these games, as well, but that's a promise that has been made before so we'll just have to play it close to the vest until we have something to show.



You’ve stated that Wish can be considered “Quest-centric.” Can you tell us more about your Quest System and maybe grace us with an example ;)

Dave Rickey:
It's really hard to describe. The problem is, "Quest" has come to mean something totally different from what it did originally. A Quest was both a journey of self-discovery, and and attempt to make some change to the world in service to something larger than yourself. But in online games, it's become "run here, fetch that, talk to this NPC, jump through the right hoops and get your "shiny". There's no self-discovery (or discovery of any kind), and no change in the world except that another copy of the "Singing Sword of Uberness" having entered it. It's pure time filler at best, simple boredom more often than not, an alternative to grinding XP out of an_orc_colossus all night long.

We've made a decision not to hand-make any quests for Wish that don't either tell a story, or make a difference in the world. We feel it's better to have a few hundred *good* quests, than a few thousand that could just as easily have been generated by an automated system once you strip away the labels. We will probably have an automated "task" system, but we're not going to waste human talent on things that don't show any real sign of human creativity. This will hopefully let us create events and settings worthy of the word "Quest".

How do you feel about the new trend of “Instancing” private dungeons and play areas in upcoming games like Mythica and World of Warcraft? Will Wish have a similar feature?

Dave Rickey:
I think it has good points, but I'm always suspicious when an entire industry is stampeding towards an unproven "Magic Bullet". Instanced content has been used in Anarchy Online and to a limited degree in EverQuest and Asheron's Call 2, and it just hasn't had the overwhelming response from the players that would justify making it the sole source of gameplay. Ultimately, when you strip away the persistance of world and free social interaction, and substitute instanced content, what you're left with is Diablo plus a really pretty replacement for Battle.net. Now Diablo is hugely popular, but would it have been nearly as popular and long-lived at $13/month?

Now I realize that's a strong statement, but I'm a strong believer in the "game as world" approach to MMO design, and to me instanced content is a complete reversal of that. Rather than making the world more complete, making the systems more stabile, making the actions of players more meaningful, instanced content is just throwing in the towel and saying "We can't make anything you do matter, but we'll make it really *flashy* while it lasts". And at another level, they're an attempt by the developers to counter the unpredictable behavior of online game communities by reverting to what they know: scripted storylines in controlled environments. In other words, they think MMO's (and especially their revenue streams) are really nifty, but they don't want to deal with all of that icky, emergent, "community" stuff, where the question of "Who is really in charge here, me or the players?" gets so hard to answer.



My thanks go out to Dave and the folks at Mutable Realms and Themis Group.
For further info on WISH you can check the link below:

Game Rifts Interview, November 2003

Original posted at http://www.gamerifts.com/sections/interviews/daverickey.shtml

This was one of a burst of interviews I did right before the Wish beta opened (in December of 2003). We managed to attract quite a lot of attention for Wish in a fairly short period of time, we were being seriously considered as a contender against EQ2 and WoW at the time.

Sections: WISH Interview
with Dave Rickey

WISH is the Ultra MMO Game in development by Mutable Realms which will bring gamers to a new, larger world of gaming in massively multiplayer games with their new server architecture allowing thousands of players to interact on a single server. Dave Riceky took time out from his busy development grind to answer our questions about this game currently in Alpha Testing.

Interview: Dave Rickey from Mutable Realms - Div Devlin (11-19-03)

Hi Dave, thanks for taking the time to talk with us. Everyone pretty much knows who you are, but could you give us a self-introduction anyways?

Well, I first started playing online games back in 1992, moving from text games to some of the early graphical efforts like Shadows of Yserbius and Multi-Player BattleTech. When UO went into Beta, I managed to snag the account of a friend, and I really, really liked what the game aspired to be. I say "aspired", because balance problems, exploits, and bugs made UO a very different game than what everyone had hoped for. But I found the ambitions inspiring enough that I quit my job developing web servers (in 1997) and set out to become an online game designer. I spent some time working with the VN, helping with the UO and AC Vaults and eventually running the EQ Vault. My first job in the industry was as the #2 GM in EverQuest, after that I went to Mythic Entertainment to work on Dark Age of Camelot in more different jobs than I am able to count, finally winding up the Content Designer. Now I'm the Lead Designer on Wish, of course.

Folks in the know, say you are a great guy and someone I could feel comfortable with drinking the night way out on the town. You're a regular guy. So, are you a glass man or a bottle man?

Beer in large quantities sometimes messes with my digestion, so I tend to stick to vodka and 7-Up with a twist when I'm out to do some serious drinking. ;-) It is interesting to contrast my online reputation with my in-person impression. I say the same things either way, but online the body language and inflections don't come across. The thing is, I've always been like this, both in person and online, I say what I mean and if you looked up "Tactless" in the dictionary you'd find my picture. But in online communication people have a lot more time to analyze what was meant as a throwaway one-liner, and it sometimes gets me in trouble.

As a designer or producer working on a title, there are always personal goals that individuals will set for themselves. Can you share with us some of your personal goals for "WISH?"

Make a wheelbarrow-load of money, buy a Porsche, get performance upgrades, the usual. ;-) Seriously, I really want Wish to move in a different direction. The industry is all stampeding towards the same things, an EQ-like PvE game, a DAoC-like PvP game, an AO-like "private dungeons" system. Don't get me wrong, these things *work*, and in some cases extremely well, but they are already out there, people who want that in their game already have that experience ready and waiting. Beyond that, nearly *all* of the upcoming games are moving in these same directions, essentially creating variants on the same middle-of-the road compromise. But I've already been there and done that, and I'm not really interested in just refining the formula.

Can you tell us what goals Mutable Realms has for "WISH?"

Did I mention the Porsche? Beyond the fact that I personally have already been part of making some of the games that defined the formula and want to move on to something more interesting, it would be foolish for Mutable Realms to try and make Wish just one more of these, trying to compete with Blizzard, Microsoft and Sony. So we're trying to look at some of the roads not taken, some of the things that *almost* worked, that were really fun but had to be sacrificed in order to solve problems in other areas. We're trying to be realistic in our goals, we think a significant portion the market is getting tired of variations on the loot-and-level theme and we want Wish to be more focused on communities and social gameplay. So we're tearing down a lot of the trappings of LnL, the strict segregation of content by level, the focus on collecting equipment as loot, the constant treadmilling on your way to become "Uber, just like everybody else."

That doesn't mean you don't have a PvE game, but do you have to have a PvE game where the goal is just grinding up the same monsters over and over for the XP, or alternatively beating on the big huge monster pinata and squabbling over the loot it drops? And Class-based systems may be good for creating mutual dependance and encouraging social bonds, but does that mean you need umpteen different classes, most of them one-trick ponies with only one gameplay element of their own to justify their existence?

And what about the roads not taken? We gave up on dynamic worlds where the monsters attack the towns and the players drive them back, but we didn't give up on them because the idea wasn't sound or fun, we gave up because our worlds wound up so crowded and our games so imbalanced that the systems didn't work. Now we know more, and CPU/memory is a lot cheaper, so let's back off a few steps and try again. I think there's a market out there for a game that brings something new to the table.

The point here is that Wish really needs to break from the pack and go in its own direction. When you're facing an increasingly crowded market, you have to think smarter and look for the opportunities that are being missed. The biggest of those is that we want to make a world where what the players do *matters*, it's not all flash and smoke and mirrors, but substantive impacts that really affect the world around them.

When we first saw "WISH," it was as a playable demo earlier this year at E3. Our first impression of it was, "We want to play it now!" As a MMO Game in alpha it looked more completed than some major titles on release. How long was it in development before it was actually announced, why the wait to announce it?

A lot of Wish's development pre-dated me, a lot of time was spent developing the underlying technologies. Distributed server architectures, reliable pathing algorithms, and robust network protocols are very important to an MMO, but they aren't very exciting and potential players aren't much interested in hearing about them. But because they started with a client-server technology and then attached a client to it, rather than the other way around like usually happens, a lot of progress seemed to happen very quickly. Mutable Realms has really assembled an excellent team, and I'm glad to have to opportunity to work with them.

Mutable Realms is small-scale company, undertaking a pretty large project. We've seen in the past the problems smaller independent designers have faced promising gamers the world, but upon release only delivering a fraction of the game play. How prepared is Mutable Realms, as well as you for taking on this game after live?

Mutable Realms is small compared to some of the other companies in the business, but fairly large for a start-up game company (about the same size as Mythic was before Camelot launched, actually). But we do have to scale some of our ambitions to meet the realities of the time and manpower available, sometimes we have to tell ourselves "That would be really, cool, but we just can't commit to doing it." However, there's often ways to finesse that. For example, it would be really cool to have a world population system based on Artificial Life systems, where creatures were born, wandered through the world eating and being eaten, all the things that everyone was promising to have 5 years ago. However, such systems are inherently experimental right now, and are more in the category of toys and academic curiousities than robust sciences we can use to build a game.

But if you really examine *what* is cool about the idea, and you study what more proven technologies like cellular automata and fuzzy-logic state machines are capable of, you realize that there may be a way to capture the same behaviours, dynamics, and fun in systems that we actually know how to build. And because we know how those systems work at much greater depth than A-Life, we have fallback positions, ways to salvage fun and preserve gameplay if our ambitions don't work out.

That being said, I'm really torn when I go to talk to players about Wish, because on the one hand I know that if I don't make bold promises that fire their imaginations and get them excited about the prospect of playing, it will be hard to attract mindshare from the other games. On the other, I don't want to make any promises I don't know I can keep, so I try to confine myself to talking about the really cool stuff we already have, rather than what we hope to have. It's really a balancing act.

Overall, how is Mutable Realms approaching "WISH" as a long term lasting MMO Game? Is it a service or is it a product?

It's both. At this phase of things, it's almost pure product, we're developing systems and content much like you would for a single-player game. But as we go through Beta and get closer to launch, it will become more and more of a service, and we've contracted with the Themis Group to help us handle that transition. And of course after launch, you are doing both at once, with part of the team developing follow-up products in the form of expansions, while a larger team provides ongoing service.

You have some major players taking part in the development of "WISH," especially when it comes to the in game music and sounds. An Emmy Award winning designer? This could be one of the first games that we don't turn off the speakers on! Can you tell us more about this?

Our sound designer is Mike Kimball, and yes, he did win some Emmys for his work on the X-Files. Since coming to Mutable Realms, Mike has been the driving force behind the development of our audio content and audio software requirements. He has really pushed the developers to provide him with the means to achieve film score sound quality. Because of his efforts, Wish has a very rich and layered soundstage.

We're rabid PvP'ers. Mutable Realms has a balance in mind, to make all our wishes come true within WISH. Can you tell us more on the PvP system and 'Houses?' Will it be akin to early Ultima Online?

Early Ultima Online was not good experience for the industry and market as a whole. The Dread Lords cast a very long shadow, to the point that Camelot, even coming out 4 years later, had to work very hard to convince people that a game with PvP as a focus could work at all. What we've learned since is that there are some players (about 20%) who are perfectly okay with PvP under almost any conditions, some (again about 20%) who don't like it under almost all circumstances, and the majority of the players (the remaining 60%) can take it or leave it alone, *as long as it will leave them alone*. Almost everyone in Camelot engages in RvR combat from time to time, but they have the power to control whether or not they are vulnerable.

Wish is providing that control in the form of the Houses. Being a House means conquering a monster-controlled town and becoming responsible for its well-being. You gain control of the town, its buildings, and the resources that surround it, and you get rewarded by being able to collect taxes on transactions within that territory. This means there's inherently a competition between towns for tax revenues, and from that the seeds of conflict between Houses. So the power to control territory carries with it the possibility that someone else will disagree with how you use that control, and declare war on you in an attempt to force you to change.

At the same time, if you're not part of a House, you're not subject to this, rather you're the beneficiary of the contest between Houses to attract your trade to their towns so they can collect taxes. So what happens in the politics and wars affects you indirectly and makes the world more interesting, but you don't have to look over your shoulder and worry that anybody is going to gank you. And the system has been set up to work even if as few as 20% of the players choose to participate in the HvH portions of the game (hmm... I wonder where that number came from ;-).

So far what has been the major hurdle in development? Will we, as players, have a working crafting system, questing system, guild interface system, before release? Will content and fun be patched in later?

Questing is already in, a minimal version of Guild support is in and the full UI should be in by Beta. Crafting is tied together with a whole bunch of other systems, and it's hard to say when it will be fully functional. But there will definitely be Crafting support by release. I'd say the biggest hurdles we are facing are the endless details that will come up as people try to find ways to manipulate the HvH systems and associated economic systems to gain advantage through loopholes, and generating enough things in the world that are interesting to keep the players busy and having fun, without resorting to tricks like long treadmills.

How long has Wish been in development now, and is the team following the philosophy of "We Will Release When It's Ready?"

Roughly the last year and a half. Our philosophy is a mixture of "We'll release when it's done" and "We'll build it so it's done when we release." By that, I mean that we look at the resources available and the systems we need, and assess the tradeoffs between adding more detail and the man-hours required to do so. Frequently there are multiple ways to implement a system, and some are more flexible to coping with deadlines than others. What we're trying to avoid is the "Aim for the moon, hit yourself in the foot" phenomenon that is so common in this business, where overly ambitious designs get slashed and burned in the last few months because the money has run out.

How will Community Relations be handled as you move closer to the starting stages of Beta? There is very little hype of WISH currently, are you guys going to do Community Relations in-house with a Manager or outsource?

In Beta, it will be outsourced to Themis. After that, we'll scale back the size of the testing population and look at bringing it in-house in the months between Beta and the pre-release load testing.

BETA? When? How? Now?

Beta is planned to start on December 1 and run through the end of February. Then we'll probably keep the most helpful of the beta testers online through the next stage of development (Gamma?) until the final month or so before launch, when we'll do load testing (Delta?).

Thanks for taking time out to speak with us and sharing with us more information in what is becoming a highly anticipated title!

RPG Planet Interview, October 2000

Originally posted at http://www.rpgplanet.com/features/interviews/camelot/

This was the first PR interview I ever did, about 1 year before the release of Camelot. At the time I was a World Builder for Camelot. Camelot's PR was just getting going, and I had taken on an evangelist role for it on various forums.

RPGPlanet | Interviews | Dark Age of Camelot
by Peter "Dynamo" Tyson | October 31, 2000

Dark Age of Camelot is a 3D MMORPG in the lands of King Arthur when it is threatened by the Celts and the Vikings. You can explore the world and also take place in large player vs. player campaigns to secure relics for your nation. We speak with Dave Rickey of Mythic Entertainment about this magical realm and have four new exclusive screenshots.

RPGPlanet: Please tell us about yourself, your role in the company, and a brief overview of Dark Age of Camelot for those that haven't heard of it before.
Dave: I'm a former programmer who got so obsessed with online RPGs that I started spending all my free time working on the EQ Vault. This led to a job with Verant as Assistant Head Gamemaster for EverQuest. I'm the "Economics Guru" and a World Builder, in addition to developing content (building terrain, placing NPCs, creating quests), I coordinate with other designers and the programmers on just about everything that affects the economy.

It is the time just after the death of King Arthur. His kingdom of Albion sorely misses his firm leadership, for the ancient land is under constant threat of invasion by the wild, magical Celts from the western island of Hibernia as well as from the wild and uncivilized Norse from the icy lands of Midgard, far to the north. At stake is each Realm's Relics - rare and extremely powerful talismen that must be kept safe in special keeps in the Realm, lest enemy raiders come and steal them.

Dark Age of Camelot is designed to provide players with a general player vs. environment (PvE) experience while their characters are low and mid-level. However, upon achieving the higher levels in the game - just when other games get stale and players run out of things to do, characters in Dark Age of Camelot will embark on their player vs. player (PvP) careers. By participating in Realm invasions and by protecting their Realm's Relics from enemy thieves, a whole new level of interaction, cooperation, and competition is opened. This almost guarantees that the game will never become boring, even for long-time players.



RPGPlanet: What unique features set Dark Age of Camelot apart from the new crop of MMORPGs that will soon be on the market like Shadowbane and Anarchy Online?
Dave: We try not to compare ourselves too closely against other upcoming games - there's a lot of room for the many different concepts that can be put into a massively multiplayer roleplaying game. However, the focus of Dark Age of Camelot is to have a game built around Realm-based PvP combat, specifically to give high-level players a reason to continue playing.
RPGPlanet: There's a lot of talk these days about players as heroes and how it is difficult for players to have that role as part of a story in an MMORPG. How will Dark Age of Camelot address this issue?
Dave: The problem stems from the fact that "Hero" status comes from recognition in the eyes of other players. In a strictly PvE game, the only way to achieve recognition in the eyes of other players is to be the first to do something. The first to reach maximum level, the first to kill the dragon, the first to get the Uber Sword.

There's also been a serious problem with the perception of PvP players as bug-abusing "dewds", who are out to ruin the play experience for others. Instead of being seen as heroes, PvP oriented players have been seen as the bad guys, the ones you don't want to share a game world with. What has made it worse is that PvP has lacked any purpose, any goal besides racking up a body count.

Dark Ages of Camelot has been designed from the start to incorporate PvP, give it purpose, and prevent it from being abused. Low-level characters are carefully insulated from any assault, players cannot betray others in their own realm, and the Relics give a real focus and goal for the combat. In such a setting, a hero is someone who effectively aids his Realm in the wars, and can be respected for that.

RPGPlanet: What games have inspired the designers of Dark Age of Camelot?
Dave: Obviously Ultima Online (UO), EverQuest, and Asheron's Call have all had an impact, we've all played at least one of those games, (most of us at least two of them). Mythic's commercial, text multiuser dungeon (MUD), Darkness Falls, is the source for the relic-centered wars.

For myself, I've gotten a lot of the inspiration for the economic design from UO, even though the UO economy didn't work as the design intended, it did show what could be done.
RPGPlanet: Other companies have released add-ons giving the players more lands and races, and while this has given a game more breadth, many have argued they have provided little depth. Can you tell us how you plan to expand Dark Age of Camelot in the future?
Dave: Adding more terrain to the existing Realms is a matter of a fairly small download, 2-4 MB per zone, and we are likely to do so in the future. By the same token, new item models, equipment skins, and graphical effects can easily be added on the fly to the core product by download. And of course, adding a fourth realm or a new set of lands could be done in an expansion pack.
RPGPlanet: Many people hate the camping that some other MMORPGs encourage. Will Dark Age of Camelot avoid this, and if so, how?
Dave: This is largely a function of how certain spawns are the only possible source of particular items, and those spawns are always in the exact same place with a schedule you can set your watch by. In Camelot, "item dropper" spawns are not nearly as predictable in either time or location, and usually that NPC will not be the only possible source of the item, "associated" NPCs in the area may also carry the item, although with a smaller chance.



RPGPlanet: The recent lawsuit by former-volunteers against Origin Systems concerning Ultima Online has prompted some people from the industry to say that volunteer support in games is dead. How will Mythic Entertainment handle customer support and game development?
Dave: We are still considering this, obviously protecting ourselves from liability has to be a major concern, but we don't want to sacrifice quality of support in the process. Our current discussions involve a mixture of in-house full time staff, and remote part time staff.
RPGPlanet: How will players be able to control and influence the world around them, outside of culling monster hordes and fighting players for the relics?
Dave: We plan on allowing control of the Frontier regions to be a fluid thing, with players able to conquer outposts and cause them to start spawning NPCs from their own Realm and flying their flag. This would bring another level of strategy to the process of warfare between the Realms.

In addition, we're going to have a very fully featured player-to-player economy inside Realms, with support for the player creation of almost everything related to combat, up to and including magical items.
RPGPlanet: How has development been and what has the team been working on this week?
Dave: Development has been a lot of fun, it's been going very well and we've been surprised at how well our basic design has withstood actual players in our Development Beta 1 test. Our biggest priority in the last week has been identifying bugs, and considering what the initial testing data says about our overall design.

RPGPlanet: Will we see any of the famous King Arthur characters appear? Do you plan to make much use of stories driven by key characters?
Dave: Some of the characters from the legends will play a part in the ongoing story of the Realms, and there will be major events in the world involving major NPCs. But we want the legends to inspire the players, not control them. This is why the game is set after Arthur's death, it's a period that the legends have almost nothing to say about. So the players have all this great background material about the world, but they're still free to make their gaming experience be about their story.
RPGPlanet: If you were one of the Knights of the Round Table, who would you be and why?
Dave: I'd have to say Gawain. Gawain's story is that of a fundamentally flawed character, who is constantly grappling with his limitations and temptations while being expected to perform great deeds. I'd only hope I could be nearly as successful in that struggle as he was.



RPGPlanet: The Arthurian, Norse and Celtic folklore certainly had a major influence on the classes and races in the game. What has it been like developing the system with history instead of raw imagination as a guide?
Dave: Fun. When you go back to the original material, you find that there are usually three or four versions of every legend and myth, often mutually contradictory and all equally "authentic". This actually makes it easier. We can take a fresh start at choosing which legends to base things on, rather than being locked into the ones everyone has seen filtered through Tolkien and several dozen other fantasy writers into this rigid system. In the usual fantasy setting, for example, the Kobold's are slightly humanoid doglike creatures that have hands but often run on all fours, sort of a gorilla with a dog's head. But when you go back to the original legends, there are actually several legends where they're somewhat like Brownies, sometimes-helpful tricksters with an appearance like a miniature Troll.
RPGPlanet: While studying these early cultures, what fascinated you the most?
Dave: Well, this just reflects my biases, but I spent weeks and weeks researching traditional crafts, and got fascinated by the fact that where they'd have extremely good empirical systems for creating better steel, they'd have no real understanding of metallurgy. They wouldn't understand why slowly baking iron in charcoal would make it into steel, but they'd have very sophisticated ways of doing so. Some really amazing techniques were developed along the way, things that may be inferior to modern methods, but were much better than you would expect from the tools and knowledge they had.
RPGPlanet: How can people become involved with Dark Ages of Camelot? When is the next beta induction?
Dave: Sometime in November, we will start Development Beta 2, which will involve about 500 testers. Once we've decided who we want to explicitly invite, we'll fill any remaining slots through a public signup. We're not yet sure how many phases of scaling up we will do, but we do intend to have a large multi-server public beta at the end.

feetofclay.us Archive

This is the Feet of Clay archive from the old feetofclay.us domain (which is now being squatted, so don't go there). It's not complete, there are about 5 posts missing from the beginning, all of the images and most of the links are broken. But there's stuff there I don't want to lose.

Lost in Red Space By Dave Rickey on Bouncing Reality Checks Okay, I've been MIA for a while, for three reasons: Family, business, and Eve. On the business front, we're getting very close to launching the graphical version of Virtual Horse Ranch, and after we do I'll have a lot to say about that process. But I had decided that I wasn't going to post just to post, rather than hammering the same points over and over or re-blogging other people's stuff, I'd only write the "good stuff". What I wanted to talk about right now is Eve, my latest gaming obsession. Eve has been described as a "spreadsheet simulator" , the most boring game imaginable. Only partially true. It is definitely true that Eve has the steepest learning curve of any game I've ever played, but this isn't because of poor design or implementation, but the sheer scale and complexity of the gameplay systems. After nearly 3 months, I'm just barely getting into the beginning of a basic understanding of the system as a whole, and there are subtleties and complexities that simply cannot be comprehensively grasped, because they are the result of player interactions and change faster than they can be absorbed. Let's take the advancement system: It is strictly time-based. You select the skill to train, and you proceed to learn that skill up to the next level. This can take anywhere from minutes to months. Many skills require other skills at a certain level as pre-requisites, and some skills require tens of millions of ISK just to purchase the skillbook that will allow you to start training them (assuming you have the pre-req's). It doesn't matter what your character does, or whether it is online or offline (as long as you log in as needed to set the next skill to train, there is no qeueing). You can learn skills faster by training up the attribute-boosting skills, and in fact this seems to be the only use of the attributes. But this means the investment of several weeks of training time, and until you've reached the point where you need multiple "skill 5's" to reach the next expansion of gameplay options, it can be difficult to bite the bullet and take the time hit. In fact, my character is only now doing so. Money is a much bigger deal, earning it can be hard, until you understand what is going on. Then a multiplicity of ways to earn cash show themselves. The best way to earn money is to own Blueprint Originals (BPO's), especially for "Tech 2"³ items or ships. But that takes weeks or months of time on the Research skills and agents, or hundreds of millions to billions of ISK to buy them on the market. The right BPO is a liscense to print money, as the supply of many critical items is controlled by the rate at which Blueprint Copies (BPC's) can be created and the number of BPO's that exist from which to create them. The easiest way is to chew rocks (mine asteroids). Everywhere you go, there are asteroid belts, and mining them is a reliable and safe (in secure space) way to make money (also boring as hell, IMO). There's a steady market for minerals, and a full cargo hold of the more valuable ones can be worth hundreds of millions of ISK. Of course, the more valuable minerals aren't found in secure space, but come from "red space" , low security systems where PvP is open and losing a ship is always only seconds away. A cargo of Morphite, Zydrine, or Megacyte is an invitation to die even in your own turf. In between, there are a lot of ways to make money. You can buy BPC's and produce products in factories, you can buy products or minerals in an area where they are cheap and move them to where they are more valuable (I made a fair amount of money just moving battleship BPC's between the three largest markets). You can exploit the NPC market for commodities, you can turn pirate and kill cargo haulers taking shortcuts through low security systems, you can hunt NPC's (also known as "rats" ), you can perform missions (equivalent to quests, automatically generated as well as scripted), you can do "deadspace encounters" that are basically like a dungeon, or many other things. But until you find ways to make money that don't bore you to tears or frustrate you to apoplexy, Eve is not much fun. More than most games, a start-up loan can make a huge difference, I myself was given 1M ISK by another blogger who plays Eve (Ethic of Kill Ten Rats), and in turn I've staked about 10 newbies the same way. 1,000,000 ISK is a trivial amount to an established player, but for a newbie it's a huge sum that eliminates a lot of grinding. Then things get really complicated. The economic interactions of Eve could keep a dozen Economics grad students in thesis material for a decade, but they are downright simple compared to the politics. Outside of "Empire" space (0.5 or higher security rating systems where the cops will respond to attacks on other players), there is no law but what the players enforce themselves. In 0.1 to 0.4 systems, there are "sentry guns" providing a minimal level of safety in the immediate vicinity of stargates and NPC stations, in 0.0 rated systems there is only the ever shifting tides of diplomacy and the safety of numbers. Roughly, you have an ongoing state of hostility between the alliances that control the territory of the celestial north and those of the celestial south. You have other complications, such as the major faction (Stain Alliance, named for the region they originally controlled) that fractured into two different groups and went to war against each other for control of the turf, dragging in most of their neighbours (Firmus Ixion, Band of Builders) and even forces from the opposite end of the map. You have two "nationalistic" alliances, the G (for German) alliance and the Red Faction (Russians). You have shoot on sight policies and transit rights and mining rights and mercenary contracts and non-agression pacts, internal political structure power struggles, just a huge multiplicity of things going on. In other words, you have a game that lives, in a way that no other game in existence does right now. Unfortunately all of this complexity and dynamism is bound to gameplay that can be described as "cerebral" at best and "boring as hell" by most. Your chances in combat are determined mostly by your ship build and the numbers of participants, with maneuver a distant third factor. The pre-canned content is no worse than that of EQ or it's clones, but it's no better, either. There are a lot of ways that Eve is just not friendly to people who can't get into the basic gameplay, and they're essentially unfixable. But if you are a game designer or commentator who wants to see what a PvP-enabled game can be when it's "done right" , how an game economy can create compelling gameplay, how politics has an infinite amount of replay value, you need to play this game. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Fri, Dec 16 2005 9:47 AM Updated: Sat, Dec 17 2005 1:07 AM Email This Clip/Blog This

What's My Motivation Here? By Dave Rickey on Random Noise F13, who also provide me with the server for this blog, are running an article of mine on player motivations and game design. Comments here Comments Keep New: Posted on: Tue, Sep 27 2005 4:20 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

It's Very Cold In Space By Dave Rickey on Observing the Obvious MMORPG.com pointed me to this interview with the Senior Producer for Eve Online. Eve is an interesting case study that violates a lot of the mainstream rules of thumb: Almost completely unrestricted PvP, almost no "content" as we're used to thinking of it, and a world that contains just players and resources for their use. The result is a testament to the power of a world that empowers the players to take power over it, and all the glory and iniquity that results. Most people have ignored Eve because it is so obviously a niche interest and the other efforts at a space MMO (Earth and Beyond, Allegiance) have failed. But it was apparently nearly immune to the predations of WoW that rocked everyone else back on their heels, and has quietly continued to grow since launch where most games stagnate. Eve may serve a niche interest, but in a rising tide that lifts all boats, it has shown the power of embracing your niche. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Sun, Sep 25 2005 5:33 AM Email This Clip/Blog This

Oh Death, Where Is Thy Sting? By Dave Rickey on Bouncing Reality Checks Okay, I'm not the biggest supporter of the real life death penalty. The classic question is "What if someone brutally and cold-bloodedly killed your Wife/Daughter/Insert Loved One Here?" The answer, of course, is "Well, that depends on whether the cops get to them before I do." And certainly I'll shed no tears for the likes of Ted Bundy. But in the abstract public policy sense, I look at how much it costs to execute someone (after all the appeals with the taxpayer footing both sides of the bill), how it seems to only apply to those too poor to have a lawyer capable of getting it off the menu, how many times someone on death row has been found to be innocent (and I wonder how many skeletons are hanging in DA closets), and it just doesn't seem worth it. Give them life without parole in a "Super-Max" facility where they'll have no direct interaction with other human beings. It's cheaper, if anything a harder punishment, and it lets us admit we're wrong later. But I've always been a fan of death penalties in online games. "Death is the game's way of telling you to slow down. It should hurt, or what's the point?" Well, what is the point of death in an MMO? Nobody really dies, they just get yanked out of their current encounter, and sent back to a safe point unless another player with the appropriate capabilities is there to bring them back on the same spot. Imagine the most extreme possible example of a lack of death penalty: You don't die. Either "God Mode" , or the structure of the game simply doesn't include death. Certainly it is possible to make a game fun that way, look at Myst. For that matter, I almost always have to switch to God Mode at some point in a storied shooter in order to beat an impossibly difficult encounter. Maybe death in games really is pointless, and in MMO's it's all just an effort to make everyone play in "Hardcore Mode" , the way the real gamers do? Lambert's 4th Law of Online Games: Players always find the shortest route to the cheese. If we've stacked the risk side of the risk/reward ratio of random encounters with hours of lost time investment, why are we surprised when players react rationally, and play as safely as possible? Can anyone give me a good reason for an EQ-style death penalty (a retroactive deletion of invested work) that doesn't apply equally well to permadeath? Maybe death penalties are just bad game design? But, what triggered this little reversal? I mentioned that I had numbers for WoW that indicated a 95% retention rate? Well, there was another game with a very low churn rates (AC1), and about the only thing it has in common with WoW is a "soft" death penalty. And there was one little other thing, the most perplexing result of my data-mining efforts in Camelot. One of the first things I looked for when I started data-mining was significant factors that correlated with the account closure rate. I looked at level, class, /played time, account age, Realm Rank, overall RvR participation (as measured by death rate), overall realm success in RvR, population balance, just about everything that the data I had available would let me look at. The first time I did this, my dataset wasn't very good and my tools were only what analysis I could do with a spreadsheet (basically only level, class, and /played time, with no way to correlate the characters of the same account), and it turned up a big spike in cancellations at 40-41st level. 41st level was what is termed a "Hell Level" , where every other level after 2nd took only a little more time to make than the one before, 40 to 41 took many times as much as 39-40. I also found a bunch of classes with higher cancellation rates, and that list became the focus of my rebalancing efforts for the next 6 months. It was almost a year later before I was able to start doing real datamining, and write my own tools to manage and analyze the data. I expected to find a plethora of factors that correlated with account cancellation, and that my biggest problem would be trying to separate the overlapping influences. What I found was a disturbing sameness; There was a direct inverse linear relationship between the highest level character on an account and the cancellation rate. If a 10th level character account had an X% chance of cancelling, and a 20th had X% - Y%, , then a 30th had an X% - (2 * Y%), and a 50th a X% - (4 * Y%), which worked out to a very low percentage of churn (<2%). Nothing else effected this chance to a statistically significant degree. Not class, realm, /played time (for that character or account total), age of account, Guilded status, Realm Rank, nothing. And my dataset and analysis tools were pretty sensitive, to the point where I could tell you how many people had joined Camelot as the vanguards for a guild from another game in the first month, and then gone back to that game when the rest of the guild didn't want to come over (216 +/-10, if you care). The older account closure data, from more than 6 months previous, showed the same correlations I had found before, with more precision, and showed them steadily being removed as various patches had addressed the underlying issues. Other than that, nothing. And that didn't make any sense to me, it wasn't like we had reached some magical state of perfect balance. There were differentials of 3 to 1 in average levelling time (XP earning rate) for different clasess, 4 to 1 in RP earning rates, and realm population balances between servers which had effects on both XP and RP. The time investment to make levels certainly wasn't uniform, ramping up in a exponential that got much steeper in the 40's, and varying between accounts by an order of magnitude. Hell, of the accounts that had been open since the first month of the game, 2/3 hadn't yet achieved a single 50th level character after nearly a year and a half. Yet none of this seemed to matter in terms of account retention. Accounts with 40th level characters on low-population realms losing in RvR that had been open for a year and a half were exactly as likely to quit as accounts with a 40th level character on a high-pop realm that was winning in RvR and had been open for 3 months. There were no loose ends, just this disturbing wall of linearity. I spent months banging my head against that wall, trying to find a crack that would might make some sense out of the rest. The conclusion I was forced to was that I had found some kind of universal constant, that any level-based game without severe gameplay and balance issues would produce a ramp of level vs. retention that would look a lot like the one I was seeing. But not neccessarily one with the same endpoints. Certainly a game was unlikely to have much better retention than we were showing for 50th level accounts, but the retention for lower level accounts was not nearly as high, and I could see both changing based on the fundamental properties and design of a game. The question I should have been asking was: Why would someone be more likely to quit if they were lower in level? Traditional wisdom had it that higher-level accounts should quit, since they had already seen everything the game had to offer, but in fact the max level accounts were the least likely to be cancelled, and not in any sudden sort of jump that might be related to eBaying of characters (accounts through the 40's were solidly on the ramp). But, reviewing all of this in light of the framework I've been exploring, this starts to make a little bit of sense. The most likely thing to make players quit is a sudden loss of accumulated "work" due to the application of a death penalty. And if this is occurring at an unconscious level, the non-linear progress of levels/time might not be a factor, and the player is just projecting their past investment forward. Certainly this strictly linear ramp I observed is unlikely to have been the result of chance. AC1 and WoW, lacking such a death penalty (instead having a temporary Utility penalty and an overhead cost of work in order to return to the scene of the earlier death), are yielding account retention much closer to their absolute ideal. And it would be interesting to know what effect City of Hero's death penalty change (from an EQ-like system to a WoW-like one) had on their churn rates. This makes the Holy Trinity of WoW as Robot Jesus Brand Power (unit sales and mindshare), Polish (high conversion from an excellent newbie experience), and "Weak Capital Punishment" (non-retroactive death penalty for a low churn). EQ-style death penalties: Bad game design, bad business, just plain bad. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Tue, Sep 20 2005 12:54 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

Robot Jesus By Dave Rickey on Random Noise Okay, I finally got some authoritative numbers on WoW in NA. 1.5 million+ boxes sold in North America, 1,000,000+ active accounts, as of the beginning of September. Plug those through a spreadsheet, and you get the improbable result that WoW has a conversion rate in the close neighborhood of 90%, and a retention of 95%. This is better than good, this is absurd (but there's not enough room for those to be off by more than a point). I've got a theory about why and I'm writing it up, but I don't think anyone is going to like it. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Sun, Sep 18 2005 1:31 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

Saturated Solutions By Dave Rickey on Bouncing Reality Checks There's a quirk about how my mind works that I sometimes find very frustrating: I can know things without understanding them. My head works in patterns of ideas, fitting them together like some kind of hyperdimensional jigsaw puzzle. Usually the pattern that emerges fits together neatly according to the rules of deductive logic. But for the hardest problems, it rarely works out that neatly. I'll know something should be true, that things should connect to each other, but some critical understanding is missing to make the pattern coherent. I have found that usually, the only thing to do is to keep dumping in facts and ideas until finally something clicks, and like a saturated solution suddenly changing state around a seed crystal, the ideas and facts all start assembling themselves around this critical piece of the pattern. The post earlier about defining the relationships between Work, Value, and Utility, was one of those moments. First, some more definitions: "”+++ EDIT: Consolidating the definitions into this post Value: An amount, as of goods, services, or money, considered to be a fair and suitable equivalent for something else; a fair price or return. Utility: The quality or condition of being useful; usefulness. In MMO's these are the capabilities represented by items and character attributes. Work: The time expended by the player in pursuit of goals. Skill: The properties of personal performance that act as an inherent multiplier on utility, value, or work in conversions of one to another. Economy: The conditions and environment within which value, utility, and work are exchanged. "”+++ Social Capital: The relationships of mutual obligation maintained by a player. Power: The aggregate of Value, Utility, Work, and Social Capital available to a player. Goal: Some change to the power of the player which that player finds desirable. Penalty: Some change to the power of the player that the player finds undesirable. Obstacle: A barrier between the player and a goal where some sacrifice of value, utility, work, or social capital is required to surmount the barrier. Risk: An obstacle that applies a penalty when the player does not achieve the goal. Now, note that the social network, by these definitions, is part of the economical structure, and the the distinction between a single-player game and an MMO is that the social network allows exchanges of value, utility, and work between players in their pursuit of increased power, rather than just between those of the individual players. It also adds social capital to the measurement of power. The only fixed resource is time. This will vary from player to player, but only by a single order of magnitude, and the vast majority of players will invest between 15 and 30 hours a week, on average. No individual player can invest less than 0 hours or more than about 100 in a week. Since the limited resource is time, and the desired goal is power, MMO's center on the conversion of time through acquisitions of value, utility, work (which can be the time of other people) and social capital into power. The strength of MMO's comes from the fact that unlike time (and therefore work), social capital is not zero-sum. If two players use social capital to pool work in pursuit of power (group together), the social capital is not neccessarily deducted from anywhere else. And if the game structure is such that the grouped players will find an increased conversion of time to value or utility (the utility gain may be either items or XP which will improve the character's attributes). Social capital allows the conversion of work (other player's time) to power, without taking as much or more as it gives overall. In this light, "inflation" becomes an overall surplus of utility or value. Currency inflation is the result of increases in the rate that work may be exchanged for value, with the result that currency is discounted when exchanged for other player's time or transferrable utility. Utility inflation can be an oversupply of transferrable utility (items) or inherent utility (character abilities). Increases in total utility generally lead to increases in currency supply, as they increase the rate that currency may be extracted over time (work exchanges for more currency). And the inflation pointed to by Ted Castronova when he says "Inflation is good" is an inflation of social capital. Increases in social capital effectively boost rates of acquisition of value and utility (conversion of work). Now, the key here is that the game must make exchanges of social capital positive-sum with regards to work. It can do this through reduction of risk (reduced chance of failure or reduction in penalties for failure) or increases in utility (higher individual XP earning or improved rates desirable item and/or currency acquisition), the players will group, but there are overhead costs of both time and social capital involved, and the gains must outweigh these. In "forced grouping" the basic process of character advancement (conversion of work to utility) is tightly involved with risk, generally in the form of death penalties. Another important factor is that inflationary pressures in one area cause deflation of all others relative to that one. Value inflations (too much currency) result in higher prices for transferrable utility and less social capital. Utility inflation causes deflations in the exchange of value for utility, and reduce social capital. However, increased social capital and its associated deflation of Value and Utility are much less pronounced, because of the inherent non-zero-sum nature of social capital gains. The players want to constantly increase power, but whole-population increases in value and utility are zero-sum, cancelling themselves out to no increase in power, and work in itself is relatively fixed, except in how its conversion is affected by social capital investment. So increases in social capital through more complex social arrangements and more productive conversions of work, are the only ways to actually increase average power. What we seem to have here are the logical relationships to prove something I've "known" for a long time: Ecouraging social complexity through more subtle collective goals and obstacles is the key to making a better, more "fun" MMO. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Sat, Sep 10 2005 12:05 PM Updated: Sat, Sep 10 2005 10:11 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

What Value is Utility Worth? By Dave Rickey on Observing the Obvious In the course of a discussion at babylona's, I've realized that we lack agreement on some basic nomenclature. Specifically, we lack a way of separating the concepts of currency, power, and time. All three are inter-related but distinct. So I propose the following definitions: Value: An amount, as of goods, services, or money, considered to be a fair and suitable equivalent for something else; a fair price or return. Utility: The quality or condition of being useful; usefulness. In MMO's these are the capabilities represented by items and character attributes. Work: The time required for acquisition of value, or utility, or both. Skill: The properties of personal performance that act as an inherent multiplier on utility, value, or work in conversions of one to another. Economy: The conditions and environment within which value, utility, and work are exchanged. The main addition here is "Work" , the first two are straight out of the dictionary. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Sat, Sep 10 2005 7:05 AM Updated: Sat, Sep 10 2005 6:22 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

Examining the Elephant By Dave Rickey on Random Noise The famous story of the blind men and the elephant is drawn from India. The blind men can't see the elephant, so they can only extrapolate from what they touch. One describes it as like a spear, another as like a tree, a snake, and so on. None of them is wrong, each is simply describing limited knowledge in terms of other things they understand. But even after you allow for the fact that each is describing a part of the elephant, and put together an image from their pieces, what you have doesn't look much like an elephant if you don't know where the pieces belong. With MMO's, we've spent a lot of time blindly feeling up the elephant. MMO's are: Games Communities Worlds Escapism Vehicles Story-Containing Dramas Treadmills Multiplayer Puzzles Conflict Generators Time Fillers And other things. But all of these are only bits of the elephant. What would the whole thing look like, if everything was in its proper place? And even that wouldn't be a picture of an elephant, but only an impression of one. So what would an MMO be, if we actually knew what it really was? Somehow we need to figure out what the core elements of an MMO are, and then we need to figure out how they are supposed to fit together, and then we need to figure out what the roles of the optional pieces are and how they fit into the picture. "Game" is at the core of an MMO. The energy sink that makes everything else happen is generated by the attraction for players of the activities presented within the game. The game attracts the players, who then form the community. The stronger and more repeatable the game experience, the more time the players spend in it. This is our first and most important mover. But in itself it won't be enough to form more than a loosely bound set of fans trading hints, with no cohesive community. That doesn't mean you can't charge a subscription for it, ala XBox Live, but in the presence of free alternatives there's no value-added to make it a viable business model. Battle.net was a loss leader for Blizzard, and even as just a chat room, matchmaking service, and performance ladder, it was an expensive one. Games are set of goals and an arrangement of surmountable obstructions to those goals. The goals can be very small and the obstructions corresponding simple, or the goals can be extremely large and the obstructions extremely complicated. Usually, you need a smooth progression of small goals and obstructions which work towards achieving larger goals with more complicated obstructions. This nesting is already pretty established in video games, but MMO's take it to an extreme, with goals that require months of effort by dozens or hundreds of people to accomplish. To create a coherent community, you need to do two things: Divide the number of players sharing the same world into smaller chunks, and get them to cooperate. MMO's as social environments are built on being, in effect, small towns where everyone knows everyone else and their history. Dividing them up is a top-down solution to the community problem, you split them into servers and realms. You can let them communicate across these lines, or you can let them interact in game terms, but not both. Getting them to cooperate is a bottom-up approach, you get it by rewarding them for working together to deal with threats or goals. This is the unique nature of MMO's which separates them from other games, that defines them as being distinctly different from any other entertainment (even other video games). Ultimately any online game experience has to center on the anticipation and release of frustration that comes with pursuing and achieving goals through the exploration and execution of gameplay. These goals do not have to be "levels" , they don't even have to be explicit. But they must be something which requires an effort, and if they are to form a coherent community, they have to be something that I cannot do in an environment that lacks other players. And the "gameplay" does not have to be explicit, either, but can instead emerge spontaneously from your systems in surprising and unexpected ways. Very little effort is required to get the players to compete, given a system where comparison is possible, they will figure out a way to wave their e-peens at each other. Much harder is getting them to cooperate. Ultimately, a "massively single-player" world where players independantly pursue their goals towards no larger purpose and with no larger context has no reason to exist, and won't for long. Ideally, there should be an infinite variety of goals, which may be pursued in an infinite variety of ways, all equally "fun". In actual implementation, the designers must reduce the variety of both the goals and the methods of pursuit. The more goal systems, the harder to keep them from stepping on each other (for example, the ongoing tension in Camelot between the PvE power fantasy and the RvR conflict of organization and shifting strategic balance). If your game has goal systems that are incompatible with each other, the conflict will resolve itself, probably to the detriment of your revenue stream. One goal system must be pre-eminent, and all others must be designed with an eye about how they affect that central goal system. So, our gameplay and goal systems, and how those interact with fundamental social formations represent the core, the main body of an MMO. I'm going to propose explicitly something that I've come close to before: Every other aspect of an online game is optional. Graphics are optional, character advancement systems (except insofar as they pertain to goal systems) are optional, even chat systems are optional. How optional? That, I'm not sure yet. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Fri, Sep 9 2005 2:51 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

Tony Montana pwns Adam Smith By Dave Rickey on Random Noise Here's the thing about designing game economies: Everything we know about economics is wrong, and economists know this. In fact, the "dismal science" is full of exceedingly accurate ways to measure and analyze"¦we don't know what, but dammit, it seems to be awfully important. Economics is trapped between the "soft sciences" where everything is an opinion and evidence is what you make of it, and the "hard sciences" , where if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist. Overwhelmed with numbers that refuse to crunch and trends that refuse to stay correlated, subject to constant boat-rocking by the latest version of tulipmania, and always being monkeyed with by those gaming the system from day traders up to national governments, being an economist must be a terminally frustrating occupation. I did the design and original implementation of the DAoC economy, including the crafting systems and the loot structures. At the time, no MMO economy had survived contact with the Live environment without blowing up all over the place in the first few months and requiring emergency repairs. The Spellcrafting/Enchantment system was months late getting implemented, but it was factored into the system from the beginning and, in fact, fit in place quite neatly (although the final design and actual implementation of those trades was done by Eric Krebs, as I was working on other things by then). In the Camelot economy through Shrouded Isles, Money = Power was explicit. There were a variety of ways to convert money to power, but the most significant were the creation of player crafted/enchanted weapons, and the maintenance and repair of keep doors in the Frontiers. Player-crafted items always had an uneasy relationship with loot items, and in essence what we wound up with was a 4 tiered system of items, where player-crafted straddled two of the tiers. It took more money to make the better crafted items, and the rate of increase was extremely progressive. The very best player-crafted items were outclassed in utility by only a handful of items, dragon loot and the like, but took staggering amounts of cash to produce (strictly speaking, an exceptionally lucky set of random numbers could produce them fairly cheaply, but in general the cost would be high). Everything wore out, given enough time, ensuring that no player could ever really be finished with the need for currency. Keep doors, on the other hand, could be repaired and upgraded extremely cheaply, if you had a huge amount of labor to throw at the problem, thousands of manhours in the most extreme case. Or you could carry enough high-grade wood for the process on a single character, but only by spending a large amount of money. This was not a trivial matter, in many cases realms that had been dominating RvR wound up on the losing side through sheer financial exhaustion after weeks of incessant attacks and the associated repair costs. Siege engines worked by the same system, one character could actually carry the wood for several siege weapons, if he was willing to spend enough (this led to the interesting spectacle of a single rogue-type stealing a relic by stealthing into the keep with a couple of battering rams in his pocket). These ensured a steady drain of currency out of the economy, acting more as an overflow valve than simply as a drain. If players found themselves with more currency, they'd set their sights a little higher when commissioning crafted equipment, or trade more cash for lower labor investment in keep warfare. Nonetheless, there was a slow but steady increase in the actual currency in the game. This could mostly be accounted for by an increasing number of level 50 characters in a position to accumulate currency, and was not apparently a concentration of wealth into the hands of the relative handful of full-time merchants (rather, it was showing up on "guild bank mules" ). I suspect that most of the full-time merchants were either routing their excess currency to their guilds, or were selling it in RMT markets. The significant thing was that once you were 50th level and around Realm Rank 4, the diminishing returns on character power increases from direct fighting kicked in hard. There was no gain to be had from XP anymore, and additional Realm Abilities would be extremely slow in coming. Characters could only eke out incremental improvement through better equipment, carrying better stat and skill enhancements. Now, here's the mental perception of "equitable" power heirarchies people seem to carry around in their heads: People are used the idea that there is an uneven distribution of assets, whether these assets are money, land, cattle, colored beads, or whatever. But here's the thing: Our mental capacities for judging where we sit on the heirarchy were evolved for small bands. When there are only a few steps in the heirarchy, it's easy to figure out where you sit. Each colored dot represents a unit of population. The more layers between you and the pinnacle, the lower your perception of your own position, the more layers below you, the higher. In bands of 100-150 people, there's only room for a few layers, and your brain can easily grasp your exact relationship to everyone. This serves to hide the fact that the real distribution is like this: 20% of the people control 80% of the power, 20% of those (4%) control 80% of that (64%), 20% of those"¦. Towards the top of the pyramid, less than 1% of the population controls more than 50% of the power. To give you a sense of what this means, if the curve represented the net worth of everyone on the planet: Note that this is only relative distribution, not absolute. In absolute scaling, Bill Gates is so far ahead of anyone likely to be reading this that we'd all be down at the very bottom of the scale, not notably higher than people in Bangladesh making $1 a day. And this points out another important attribute about perceptual position: We compare to what we see around us. Poor people in the US are wealthier than 80% of the planet, but they aren't comparing themselves to the subsistence farmer in Bangladesh or the neolithic hunter-gatherer in New Guinea. They compare themselves to what they see around them, and on TV. Odds are, most of the people you know are in roughly the same position, wealth-wise, as you are. They may make as little as a quarter of what you do, or four times as much, but you probably don't know many people outside that range, and you probably don't know those well. But on TV, you generally see only the upper middle class and above, the top 3/5th's of that second pyramid. You are constantly reminded that you are very far down the pyramid. In online RPG's, character power tends to be distributed much differently. The bottom of the heirarchy is everyone who has not yet maxed out a character, the top is very flatly distributed: In practice an actual game population plotted out this way would show a much more lumpy distribution in the cap, with different classes and other character development choices distorting the pattern. But the point is that everyone winds up on the same scale. The comparatively low populations per server help with this, the 100 or so people you know are a much larger proportion of the population of a game than they probably are of the city you live in. Now, this refers only to character power, as represented by stats, abilities, and equipment. Wealth in the form of currency winds up in a pareto distribution. The moderation of the ability for wealth to buy power through diminishing returns, either explicitly as in Camelot's system, or by increased time investment and artificial scarcity as in EQ or WoW, represents an effort to keep the power distribution flat. Not usually out of any conscious design decision, but simply because that was the way the wind blew. After a certain point, currency wealth is more easily converted to power by using it to help others, your friends, your guild, or if applicable your realm. It can take huge amounts of currency to gain a tiny increment of improvement in your character once it already has really good equipment, where the gratitude and reciprocated assistance of others may be purchased more cheaply. This can be viewed as a positive reinforcement for social engagement. On the other hand, the Time/Scarcity method of flattening the power distribution represents a negative reinforcement, you must aid others in order to be aided yourself. All of the complicated dance of "raid schedules" , "raid points" , and "need before greed" is a complicated means of doing something very simple: Trying to keep the most successful from kicking in the Matthew Effect and accelerating out of sight towards the top of a pareto distribution. However, it doesn't work that well. In effect, the players look around them, judge their own capacity to generate power relative to those in their guild, and either leave to join a more "hardcore" guild where they will get a return in proportion to their contribution, or agitate to kick out under-performers they (mostly correctly) see as holding them back. As a result, you get a pareto distribution at the guild level, with the most hardcore guilds holding orders of magnitude more power per capita than the average. This puts an EQ-style game in between Scylla and Charybdis. If they do not engage in constant mudflation, the "uber" players will feel the mob catching up to them, and the lack of opportunities before them, and jump ship. Since they are your highest profile players, even if disliked, this will give other players the impression of a dying game. It may also cause other degenerative effects, based on the product trajectory of AC1. On the other hand, too much expansion of the power differentials will force those players left behind to the realization that they will never catch up. This is the real problem represented by the TOA expansion in Camelot, the "Master Levels" and "Artifacts" granted so much additional power to those who could achieve them that those who could not, could not compete. A static power distribution leads to discontent. If you know where you stand, and you know where everyone else stands, and nothing is likely to change unless you abandon the treadmill and let everyone pass you up, then your discontent has no outlets. This leads to the "˜nerf wars', campaigns to have particular classes and/or skillsets changed to be either more or less powerful. Usually less, the players of an MMO have been likened to a basket full of crabs: No need to put a lid on the baskets, because any crab that comes close to escape will be pulled back in by the others. This leads to another important observation: People are more aware of others having advantage and/or power than they are of the advantage or power they have over others. The rich are envied, the poor are invisible, even to themselves. If some illusion of upward mobility is not maintained, all hell breaks loose. In MMO's, this illusion comes partially from the patch cycle. Every patch offers at least the possibility of a reshuffling of power relationships, lifting some up while pulling others down. But if too much upward mobility is actually granted"¦all hell breaks loose, as those left behind become aware of their reduced relative position. Here's the thing: Lyndon Johnson may have been shocked to learn that 50% of the population was of below average intelligence, but an analysis of social dynamics quickly yields the counterintuitive conclusion that 80+% of people are below average in aggregate ability for any complex task. A handful of extreme performers, be they uber-guilds, professional sports players, or just lucky stiffs who were in the right place at the right time to gain some initial advantage that then compounded, skews the "average" performance upwards and leaves the vast majority in the dust. In the end, all of this is probably the result of hard-wiring at the genetic level. We (meaning our hominid ancestors up until 10,000 years or so ago) seem to have gone through regular periodic population crashes, perhaps starting as the effect of ice age cycles but eventually becoming part of our evolutionary strategy. 50% or more of a local population would routinely die off, the survivors would tend to be those that had accumulated the greatest power, including that they had inherited. So we are not satisfied with "adequate" performance, we are driven to achieve exceptional results. This is apparently even more pronounced in males than females. Men have a greater potential upside to their reproductive chances (the most prolific male in history had 888 acknowledged children). The current EQ-derived MMO's are a characature of adolescent male power fantasies. The problem is, as I've pointed out before, that the illusion of power is very thin, and eventually this becomes laid bare for the players. We're going to have to do better. And here is why Tony Montana is wiser than Adam Smith: Scarface knows what it's really all about. "In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the woman." We are tapping into something very fundamental here. Like our attraction to sugar, the fact that these mental drivers are not actually achieving their goals may be irrelevant: These drives do not evaluate their results, they merely present itches we must scratch. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Wed, Sep 7 2005 5:39 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

It Just Doesn't Make Any Sense By Dave Rickey on Random Noise Scott pointed to this article at the New York Times website (check Bug Me Not to get a login). Actually, the article does a pretty good job of describing the current state of the market, and Seth Schiesel (the author) is either a journalist who happens to be a gamer, or a very good journalist, because he gets it (among other things, he quotes a Guild Leader, a first as far as I know for the NYT). But at the end, he quotes a Wall Street analyst who doesn't get it. In any case, as in years past, there are those who believe that paid online gaming is all a fad anyway. "I don't think there are four million people in the world who really want to play online games every month," said Michael Pachter, a research analyst for Wedbush Morgan, a securities firm. "World of Warcraft is such an exception. I frankly think it's the buzz factor, and eventually it will come back to the mean, maybe a million subscribers." "It may continue to grow in China," Mr. Pachter added, "but not in Europe or the U.S. We don't need the imaginary outlet to feel a sense of accomplishment here. It just doesn't work in the U.S. It just doesn't make any sense." This one deserves to go up alongside "640K of RAM should be enough for anyone" and "we forsee a market for 50 computers in the entire world" for it's incredible naivete, but at least Mr Pachter isn't a major player in the very industry he's misjudging. Which is as good a segue as any into my next topic: The growth rate of the industry. I'm still not totally trusting of WoW's numbers, even though they are claiming "one million paying customers in North America." I'm not sure what definition of "˜paying customer' Blizzard/VU are using, but since they have sold no more than 1.2M boxes in North America, either they have ridiculously high conversion and retention rates (in excess of 90% conversion and 97% monthly retention), or "˜paying customer' means "anyone who has ever paid us for WoW." Runescape's numbers are also suspect, not because I don't believe they have that many active players (they make their login count public, and it's in line with those numbers), but because RS can be played for free, although with restrictions on gameplay. That they had 180-200K paying subscribers as of June I can believe, even 250K at the outside, but not 379K. If we take those two games, massage their numbers back to something more credible (eliminating WoW's Korean 500K) and compare that to the earlier trend, we find the market was on track with earlier 60% annual growth rates (2.5M in June-04, 4.0M in June-05). Even if we trust the WoW numbers (but not the Runescape) and just eliminate the Korean WoW players, we get about 4.3M and a 70% annual rate. Why eliminate WoW's success in Korea (and China) from the analysis? Because other than WoW, no game has crossed over between those markets, and until something else does I'm going to assume this was a unique event based on the power of the Warcraft/Blizzard brands. And I'm not running down Runescape, I think what they have accomplished in extremely impressive and contains an important lesson, but I'll discuss that later, in another post. The big thing here is that there are no signs of market saturation. We've got the same trends playing out in the same ways, just on a bigger scale. If you project DAoC's 250K in 9 months forward in time 4 years at 60% growth, you get an overall market 4 times the size and WoW suddenly becomes, proportionally, only a little more successful in the US/Europe than Camelot (although as it did cross over to Asia, it is still overall a much larger success). And even so, EQ2 seems to have hit close to the 500K mark itself. Other games took a hit, but none a crippling one (30% at most, 15-20% for most). Most of the playerbase for EQ2 and WoW came from the new growth, and the apparently explosive growth was a combination of repressed growth in the period before their launch (which we have seen many times before) and, IMO, some creative semantics in the Blizzard press releases being taken at face value. Oh, and I know that a lot of people don't like Bruce Woodcock's numbers. As noted, I don't believe them for WoW and RS myself. However, they are the best available. If someone else wants to collect and publish the data for a better set, I'll use theirs. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Tue, Sep 6 2005 9:43 AM Email This Clip/Blog This

Running On Empty By Dave Rickey on Random Noise I've got about 10 drafts about online game design and operation waiting for me to finish them, some of them are fundamental stuff that sums up 6 years of earnest investigation into some of the toughest problems. But I can't finish them, or even get much work done today, because I'm fucking pissed off. New Orleans is fucking gone, had the heart ripped right the hell out of it. Over a million people are refugees, with no homes or jobs to go back to, and that's just NO, most of coastal Louisana, Mississippi, and Alabama are nearly as bad off. I have a fond memories of the Big Easy, or more accurately, the memories I have of spending the last weekend before Fat Tuesday there back in "˜92 are hopelessly scrambled, I know I can't have mooned the cop on Sunday, because I'm sure I lost my pants Saturday night. I was there because the Air Force sent me to Keesler AFB in Biloxi for my technical training. Keesler is pretty much gone itself, along with Biloxi, Gulfport, and too many another towns and cities to bare counting. They're not even trying to count the dead, because they don't have any time to waste if they don't want more of the living to join them. 50-100K are trapped in New Orleans, out of water, out of food, unable to reach hospitals that are unable to get their patients out. The police have apparently gone totally bugfuck insane. If it were happening in some other country, we could shake our heads at how terrible it is not to be lucky, to not live in America where shit like this doesn't happen. Venez-fucking-uela is offerring to send us aid, even though Pat Robertson wants to give him a noodle (a shot to the back of the head, also known as a "pill" ). And we probably need to take it. Somewhere around 30% of our domestic oil is produced in the Gulf, supported out of and funneled back through New Orleans. Another 15% or so from Texas, sent to the Northeast via pipelines that don't have any fucking power. 25% of all the shipping into or out of the US moved through the Port of New Orleans. Okay, the levies weren't high enough, the local building codes strict enough, the local emergency personnel equipped or trained to deal with such a worst-case scenario. None of these things are unusual, Katrina was going to be bad and New Orleans flooded no matter what, because we never like spending money to forestall unlikely weather or seismic events. But"¦. Where the hell are the choppers? Not the Coast Guard Rescue, TV Station news choppers, corporate exec shuttles, sightseeing taxis, "Life Flight" ambulances, and the rest of the rag-tag collection pulling people out by twos and threes because that's all they can hold. I'm talking about the US Army Blackhawks, Pave Lows, and Chinooks that could hold as many people as a Grayhound bus and get them out of there at 200MPH without having to worry about clogging the damned roads? Where are the goddamned amphibious landing craft that could be pressed into bus service? They don't need any roads, either, they could just swim to Houston. Where are the Army and Marine Reserve and the national guard to keep order? Why aren't there a few wings of C100's and C130's kicking crates full of food and water out the back hatch over New Orleans and the rest of the gulf coast? They're all in fucking Iraq, "building democracy" one corpse at a time. Fucking amphibious "armored" (with fucking aluminum) personnel carriers are being used in the middle of the goddammed desert because we bit off more than we could chew, so Bush Jr. could settle his daddy's scores. In the name of "fighting terrorists" by forcing "regime change" on the government that was #4 on their list of places they really hated. The huge stockpiles of MRE's and bagged water? "forward deployed" to support whatever piece of military adventurism we get sent off on next. You could make an argument that Katrina is the result of the global warming Bush claims "needs more study" before he can follow the Kyoto Treaty that is already signed and approved. But it's hard to follow and not all that convincing, so I'll stop short of blaiming Bush Jr. for the disaster of Katrina. The disaster of what happened afterwards? That's right on his shoulders. We can't do what has to be done, because the cupboard is bare. Ever since this thing started, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Condy Rice, and Bush Jr. himself have been assuring us that we are the world's only superpower, prepared to wage two major regional conflicts at any time, just like WW2. Shit, if Kim Jong Il wants South Korea, now is the time to take it, and all we'll be able to do is try and scoop out the 40K troops there before they get rolled over. Our government has spent 5 years under the control of a team of corporate raiders straight out of the 80's, stripping it down and selling off the pieces, and now we're reaping the results. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Thu, Sep 1 2005 6:18 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

Bullet Time Blues By Dave Rickey on 5-Baggers I'm stealing one of Damion's bits for a new category of posts: 5-Baggers are just my out-loud musings for game mechanics that might work, or at least might be worth exploring. Most of them will probably not work, but they might, at least under the right conditions, done the right way, for the right game. The one that just hit me was "Bullet Time" as a solution to the twitch-combat problem in MMO's. Twitch doesn't work well in MMO's right now because players have little control over their latency, and a tenth of a second (100ms, or about the difference between a good broadband connection and a so-so one) is a long time in FPS-style combat. There is a lot of well-established prior art for melee combat (every console fighting game ever made, along with Die By The Sword and Jedi Knight), but again, tiny fractions of a second are a huge advantage. But"¦. Advanced students of the martial arts talk about reaching a stage beyond mastery of the forms and techniques (which are all about hard-wiring reflexive responses to threats and opportunities), where the mind disconnects from the stream of consciousness and becomes capable of operating faster than the pace of events. Although most actions are still pre-programmed, drawn from the forms and techniques, the mind is able to strategize and analyze, steering the body without being in direct control of it. Race drivers talk of a similar state, where even though the events in a crash occur too quickly for the ordinary decision-making latency, they are able to look ahead in time, see where the standard response to the situation is going to make things worse, and modify an action that has not actually been taken yet. What if, instead of being dependant on lightning-fast reflexes and single-digit pings, we paced a system of twitch FPS or melee fighting combat to make everything occur in "bullet time" , where decisions made now would not finish being executed for some number of seconds? In Max Payne, when you trigger bullet time with a shoot-dodge, you're committing the next several seconds to moving in a certain direction along a predictable path, but you're also slowing everything else (including your own bullets) down. With practice you can actually dive forward through a hail of shotgun pellets, throwing your body through a void in the pattern. Ditto in JK:II, with the additional twist of melee combat, you can watch your opponent start a swing, then set your body and trigger your own light-saber for a block-and-counter. Even though the result is just as viscerally engaging as tradional twitch for most people, the time scales are such to allow someone besides over-caffeinated 14 year-olds to compete, and significantly improve the tolerance for lag. Now, MxO tried something like this, but frankly I think they just didn't have a very good implementation. If you didn't bring the right techniques to the fight, you were pretty much screwed, and everything occurred in a "combat cloud" type of environment I didn't like the first time I saw it, back in The Realm, where no-one not already part of the fight at the beginning could even watch it, never mind participate. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Sat, Aug 27 2005 4:19 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

Neuroses and Insecurities By Dave Rickey on Observing the Obvious Every once in a while, I meet someone who I realize is genuinely smarter than I am. Not just better informed on a particular subject, not just more experienced at a particular intelligence-related set of tasks, but genuinely smarter, better than me at the things I consider myself good at. Will Wright was one of those, the way he can wrap his mind around the entire problem of "possibility space" potentials in game design leaves me in awe. This lady is another. A lot of the same things I've been struggling to express about the way that fields like Economics, Sociology, even Archaeology and Evolutionary Biology connect to MMOG design, she ties up in nice little packages. If you have any interest in the theoretical underpinnings of MMO design and why they're important to making better games, go read her stuff. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Sat, Aug 27 2005 3:20 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

A HRose By Any Other Name By Dave Rickey on Bouncing Reality Checks I'm not quite sure when HRose first starting cyber-stalking me. Not that it's in a creepy way, it just that for the last two years, everywhere I go online, there he is. And he's almost as much of an iconoclast as I am, with much less at stake for saying it like it is since he doesn't appear to want to work in the industry (which I believe would be difficult, anyway, as he's Italian). So every once in a while, he and I start sending the brickbat back and forth, passing it by bouncing it off some particularly egregious example of game design foolishness. Our differences are usually on the order of debating the number of angels that may dance on a pin, we're in agreement on so much of the basics. But in this post about Eve, I have to call him onto the carpet. Eve has a lot of lessons for us, but not the ones he says (or at least not in the ways he says). Eve had the crappiest launch since UO, with similar results. The initial retention rate for them must have sucked, I don't know how many boxes they moved, but it was a lot more than the 30K subs or so they had at the end of their first few months. And in the mainline industry of fantasy MMO's, that would have set them up for an AC2 or Horizons style decline straight to the bottom. They didn't take that dive for the same reason UO didn't: They have no real competition. Jumpgate got nailed in the shorts by their distributor and never recovered, it sits in free-wheel mode with a few thousand subs while Netdevil works on Auto-Assault for NCSoft. Earth and Beyond's merely five-digit subscription levels were an embarassment to EA, the huge cost vs. the modest revenues an accounting problem to their quarterlies, and it was shut down. Not only did this give the Eve community a nice infusion of newbies, but it cleared the course and left Eve the only game in town for those who wanted a space-exploitation game with depth. The result has been a steady, if not exciting, growth. So now Eve has the market position of pre-EQ UO, in a niche too small to attract the big boys, and enough of a lead to repel the small fry. Its an admirable strategic position to claim, and one place I do agree with HRose is that they are securing it well. They aren't engaged in e-peen contests with competitors (they have none). They aren't wasting time building huge but formulaic content expansions (they have no content to expand, not in the sense that we normally use the term). They're building gameplay and improving systems, and letting the players entertain each other. There are a lot of lessons Eve can teach us. But let's not go off half-cocked and learn the wrong ones. Eve's business position is so unique, it serves only as an outlier, a boundary point that shows what can happen, when a game has a niche to itself that grows so slowly that it attracts no competitors. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Tue, Aug 16 2005 7:13 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

Ready, Fire, Aim By Dave Rickey on Random Noise My hosts at f13 have an article from last week talking about the way that the pre-owned games market is slowly strangling the console games industry. However, this is not, as they suggest, solely the result of the pricing models used by the industry. It's pretty much self-inflicted damage, and another consequence of the increasing costs of game development that come with our ever-climbing production values. Here's what it comes down to: In response to the pressures of spiralling costs, and out of a desire to appeal to more casual players, the length of gameplay contained in a title has been steadily decreasing. Now, from a certain point of view, buying a console game carries an implicit option to sell, which has an increasing cost to excercise. Buy it on opening day and sell it the day after, you lose $25. Buy it a week later, used, and sell it a week after that, it costs you $20. Buy it new a week later and sell it used, you lose $30, which increases the incentive to buy a hit on Day One and accelerates the "Hit Driven" cycle. The more popular the game, the slower the loss of value and the less it will cost you to turn it around. The shorter the game, the faster you can turn it around, and the less it costs you. What we have here is a positive feedback loop of the worst kind, the vicious cycle. The incentives on developers are for shorter games (because higher production values demand either fewer assets or bigger budgets, and it's easier to clip off missions/features/etc., than to get more money). The incentives on publishers are for shorter games (because they require less manhours to QA and are less likely to go into a money-sucking "death march" ). The incentives for EB/Gamestop and other game-only retailers are for shorter games (because they'll turn around faster into trade-ins and more sales). And the incentives for players are for shorter games (because they'll depreciate less). God of War was a great game. Beautiful, well-written, well put together, and even some small innovations. But even I, not exactly a sprinter when it comes to running through the gameplay, finished it in a week. Now, I'm not very effective at playing the trade-in game, because I bought it new rather than used when it had been out several months, and I didn't take it back and sell it. So even though it was a good game and I enjoyed it, I'm not sure it was worth the $40 it cost me, to only keep me occupied for about 40 hours. I really should have bought it used, raced through it, and taken it back. But I don't play that many games these days. GTA: SA, on the other hand, has generated hundreds of hours of gameplay for me. I may never finish it (I never did finish Vice City), but I don't really care, I more than got my money's worth. I'm planning on picking up Psi-Ops (used if I can find it locally, otherwise off of Amazon new), because a write-up on another blog (which I now can't track down to link) convinced me it has some of the same open-ended sandbox capability with some really novel twists in emergent gameplay. Notice that if I want to find it locally, I have to buy it used, the hit-driven focus has become a self-fulfilling prophecy where I cannot buy the game new (and therefore put money in the publisher's and developer's pockets) without enduring the delays of ordering from an Amazon affiliate (who might actually send me a "mint" used copy, and still they don't get paid). Games with interesting, novel gameplay that might have some staying power or "sleeper" potential are getting pulled off of the shelves quickly because the used market quickly absorbs the ongoing demand. I realize Psi-Ops is a year and a half old, but I doubt I would have had much luck finding it new last August (although my odds of finding it locally used would have been much higher). In the narrow overlap between full-price new and discount used for niche titles, there is an even steeper premium for buying new, which increases the effective cost of buying a non-hit (here's where the discount schedule schild is complaining about really does set in). The increasing production values required by the next generation of consoles are going to ratchet this up another big notch, but even if the hardware froze right where it is now, this vicious cycle would still be steadily undermining the economic underpinnings of the industry. This can't go on. The "˜niche' titles are the first casualties, but the same effects will move up the food chain until only the biggest hits are economically sustainable. Technorati Profile Comments Keep New: Posted on: Mon, Aug 15 2005 11:24 AM Updated: Sun, Sep 11 2005 10:16 AM Email This Clip/Blog This

The Fantastic Vs. The Epic By Dave Rickey on Fighting Words Assuming that I'm still in enough RSS feeds for anyone to notice, I thought I'd take a few minutes to talk about the difference between "Epic" and "Fantastic". I have two pictures of dragons that I hang on my office walls (yes, of which I have had too many). Both dragons are green, winged, reptilian, the very epitome of a generic fantasy dragon. One, a large poster print of an original by Chris Achilleos, is one of the definitive images of what people expect for a dragon, especially if they play fantasy-themed MMO's. A green dragon assaults a castle, bowling over a mounted knight and confronting a wizard as it rips the chains of the drawbridge apart. The scene is a perfect example of what people mean when they say "Epic" fantasy. "Epic" gets thrown around a lot in the industry, as a marketing buzzword, as a supposedly serious description, as a label for shineys or other content. And it doesn't mean much anymore as a result. Dragons, demons, fortresses, gods, none of it matters. "Epic" turns out just to mean "Really Big". Take your generic NPC, apply a unique model, give it a godawful bucket of hitpoints, script some special triggered attacks, and voila, instant "Epic" encounter. An "Epic" weapon is just a weapon a few percentage points better than anything else in the game (at the moment it is added, anyway), an "Epic" quest just has a lot of steps to take and hoops to jump through, an "Epic" dungeon has virtual miles of large corridors, filled with NPC's that use models unlike those elsewwhere in the game, but that behave exactly the same in most, if not all, ways. Epic sucks. Epic is the game design equivalent of a car chase in an action movie: A cheap trick to create a sense of excitement. And current fantasy MMO's have become the equivalent of a 70's car chase movie, that cheap trick expanded to ridiculous, self-parody proportions. The sense of excitement is maintained at all costs for as long as possible, then trails off into an obvious stub intended to set up the next installment. Nothing is resolved, nothing is accomplished, but it was a hell of a ride, wasn't it? The other dragon is a much smaller picture, a cheap print in a better frame, that I bought at the Maryland RennFaire: A green dragon crouches on top of a fencepost, clutching a chicken egg and confronting the broken window of a farm outbuilding, possibly the chicken coop. The scene is certainly not "Epic" , but it is equally as "Fantastic". More so, since the huge and powerful dragon confronting the players has become such an over-worked cliche in fantasy MMO's. And this is why I continually return to the question of how to integrate AI and A-Life into a fantasy MMO: Because it represents the hollowness at the core of the fantasy MMO's: Their lack of the "Fantastic". The most wonderful thing about so-called "Epic" fantasy novels such as the LotR series or the movie Willow are the small details. The Hobbit starts out in the Shire, with simple, homey descriptions of the houses and lifestyles of the hobbits. It's quite a ways into the book before we run into anything really magical, as opposed to Gandalf's fireworks and pipe-smoke tricks. This is, of course, the One Ring, but we don't know that yet. The Ring seems simply a rather useful trinket, although undeniably magical. And things don't approach the "Epic" until the last few chapters, when we finally meet Smaug. Yet the fantastic permeates the book long before that. The hobbits and their surroundings, the dwarves, the trolls, little bits of the fantastic smoothly interwoven with the mundane. You're enjoying the book thoroughly well before it becomes "Epic" (or if not, you probably won't keep reading that far, but I've never met anyone who didn't). The "Epic" trick isn't used until you're already thoroughly invested in the adventure, and then it is released and we return to the simply fantastic. Tolkien was, to put it bluntly, not quite right in the head. To say he "had an active imagination" is so much an understatement, I can't think of a metaphoric equivalent that really captures it. He created an entire universe, with its own history, ecology, physics, theology, everything. And most of this is never explicitly referenced in any part of the stories. Yet it permeates them, drives them, underlies all these little bits of the fantastic we encounter on our way to the epic showdowns (which themselves are the result of "hidden backstory" only briefly and incompletely described). The result is so powerful, it has defined the very concept of "fantasy" in just about every medium. Most fantasy novels, games, movies, etc., are either shadows of Tolkien's vision, or blatant rearrangements of the form (but not the substance). Most modern non-Tolkien fantasies with staying power are darker visions grouped under a seperate classification: Horror. Now, this is not a gripe about the derivative and unimaginative nature of our most successful games. Quite the opposite, I've come to the realization that creating powerful and engaging imagery is hard. Really hard. Much easier just to borrow it, or liscense it. But when you examine these other fantasies, casting a wider net to include things not normally classed as capital "f" Fantasy, you find some common features. One of them is the "Secret History". Star Trek and Star Wars both show this trait in its most obvious form, having an explicit timeline known to their chief creator, but not to the audience of the time. This history is sometimes alluded to or even explicitly referenced, but never completely related. Yet it permeates the work as originally presented, often in ways that are missed by most of the observers. Another is the "Big Idea". One big assumption that, once accepted by the observer, changes everything and assigns a different meaning to otherwise mundane things. These then become fantastic. The best example of this would be vampires. The original vampire legends were not particularly similar to their modern forms, but if you accept the central concept, human beings that are effectively immortal and required to feed on the life essence of other humans, you eventually get Ann Rice, Vampire: The Masquerade, and the Buffiverse. And Sci-Fi is filled with Big Idea fantasies, the best known being dystopian visions like Terminator or Blade Runner. Here's the thing: It's hard to create powerful imagery under the best of circumstances. It's additionally hard to do so in a collaborative environment like a movie or TV series. But to do so in a collaborative environment when you can't control the viewpoint the player will perceive it from (as in single player games) is so hard, it's arguable if any game has really done it without wresting control of the viewpoint away from the player, and coming up with something closer to an interactive movie than a computer game. And to take that a step farther, creating imagery that is powerful regardless of the viewpoint, from hundreds or thousands of viewpoints simulataneously? That, my friends, is not something we're going to do using the current methods. This we're only going to solve by cracking some really hard issues of craft. AI and A-Life offer the strongest prospects of allowing us to flesh out a world that can carry this imagery and sustain the illusion from all these simulataneous viewpoints, and we have to do that before it matters what those images are. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Sun, Aug 14 2005 8:15 AM Email This Clip/Blog This

Cry Havoc By Dave Rickey on Random Noise Greg Costikyan has some insightful commentary on the ongoing battle between "narratologists" and "ludologists" over who gets to handle the academic critique of games. For those just tuning in (or that don't care), narratologists say that games are just stories, and therefore can be analyzed and deconstructed just like ay other "text" , ludologists say that games are something compeletely different, that may contain stories but aren't just stories, and their analysis is going to require a whole new set of tools. But he misses why the debate gets so charged and ideological. It's not just a "colonial power grab" by the narratologists, something much deeper is at stake, from the viewpoint of academia: The continued existence of the "Post Modernist" movement in the arts. Why is very simple. One of the fundamental underlying tenets of post-modernism in the arts is that every form, medium, and technique of artistic expression has already been developed, there is no way to create truly new art. All you can do is deconstruct the old, and re-arrange the pieces (this is why painting words from a poem on cows and letting them wander around is "art" ). The explanations and conclusions from this get outright theological in their complexity, but the point is that if there such a thing as new art, especially an entirely new art form created through new technlogy, then there could be many more, and most of the academic work on analyzing and critiquing art performed in the last 60 years or so is a complete waste. Yes, even more of a waste than you thought. So if the ludologists are right, and games are truly, fundamentally different from books, plays, movies, etc., and cannot be viewed simply as narratives, then the whole post-modernist house of cards falls down, at least in the arts, and the humanities and soft sciences (already under siege by reductionist interlopers from the hard sciences) are shaken. This is why there will not be, cannot be, any quarter granted in the Ludology vs. Narratology wars. The narratologists will lose, for one simple reason: Please deconstruct and analyze, using narratological techniques, "Tetris". Now, remove the word "Tetris" along with other easy identifiers such as the release date and the name of the creator from your analysis, and show it to a gamer. If they can't tell you were talking about Tetris, then you weren't, you were discussing what your narratological tools allowed you to analyze. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Tue, Jun 21 2005 4:18 AM Email This Clip/Blog This

Send in the Clones By Dave Rickey on Random Noise Anyuzer doesn't like my using the term "EQ Clones" to describe WoW and all of the other games that will inevitably follow after it. Ignoring the cheap shots, here's where he's wrong: World of Warcraft"¦ wait, wait for it"¦ is really just a bunch of small goals thrown together. Every game is a set of small goals put together. It describes both EQ and WoW because it describes every game, from Go through Axis and Allies to Pong and GTA. This is not why WoW is an "EQ Clone". WoW is an "EQ Clone" because it involves taking a viewpoint called a character representing the player through a sequence of content, building up the capabilities of the character by attaching bits of that content to it. Usually this attachment is generic (XP), sometimes it is temporary (equipment), sometimes it is permanent (abilities and spells), and sometimes it is situational (" keys" to other bits of content like areas or quests), all of this done in an environment shared with other players that you both cooperate and compete with. Only the character is persistant, everything else is either permanent (terrain, buildings, names NPC's, encounter spawns) or transient (creatures, items not attached to characters). Combat and interactions are all character-based, with the player participating only at the "meta-game" level, what to fight, where to go, etc. Characters are grouped into "classes" that correspond to the Tank/Nuker/Healer division, with some hybridization. This is what I mean by "EQ Clone" in the generic sense. We're going to see a lot of these. The important thing here is that they will all be oriented on "characters" and "content". Gameplay will vary little, setting will vary considerably but meaninglessly, social dynamics will be basicly the same. Cumulative character games are an excercise in power-fantasy wish fulfillment, and they will burn out eventually because the wish fulfillment is ultimately an illusion, and the power fantasy a lie. You fight polygons to get stronger, in order to fight bigger polygons and get even stronger, so that you and 50 of your friends can fight really freaking huge polygons. This is an "EQ Clone" game, and after 2 or 3 years, it starts to pale. So why is WoW so successful? Because to most of the people playing it, this is all new. They haven't had time to get bored of it yet. And Blizzard did a really good job of making an EQ clone, smoothing out the gameplay, building a nice UI, and building a lot of content. WoW is not Robot Jesus, not the ultimate expression of the MMO. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Sun, Jun 19 2005 8:59 AM Email This Clip/Blog This

Stalking the 800 Pound Gorilla By Dave Rickey on Bouncing Reality Checks Over at Grimwell and The Cesspit, they've got a discussion of why designers won't understand why WoW did well. I figure I might as well take my shot at getting it wrong. WoW did so fantastically well because of three things: The Warcraft and Blizzard brands. Don't underestimate this. The overall game experience is smooth, polished, and much simplified from the arbitrary and often sloppy execution in other EQ-like games. There is an incredible amount of good content in the game. Stuff that somebody thought through. On point (1), there is probably only 2 or 3 game brands with the same recognizability as the Blizzard label, and none that has the same power to get people to buy. GTA/Rockstar, The Sims/Maxis, and Tomb Raider/Eidos are the only real competition for recognizability, and even they don't have millions of fans prepared to buy anything that their developers put out, just because they made it. Blizzard has put a lot of effort and slipped a lot of release dates to earn that level of trust, and it just paid off in spades. On (2), this is a Blizzard trademark. They don't innovate, they refine. They do it very well, and they were obviously paying a lot of attention to the prior EQ-like games. WoW is a Boiler-Plate Fantasy (BPF) 3D Diku MUD finally done right, when it comes to interface and gameplay. (3) is the big one, the one that sucked up a lot of that money. When you look at any other MMO with a lot of content, what you generally see is that 95% of that content is "filler". Someone was presented a checklist, and told "Populate these towns, build X number of quests, build this many zones." They were given a tight timetable to do it, and adequate but not excellent tools. This so-called "content" is uninspired and uninspiring. Kill 10 rats/lizards/demon, collect the tails/teeth/horns, turn them in for XP/cash/an item. The remaining 5% gets built because some world-builder really wanted to do it, and found time (usually overtime outside the schedule) to make it happen. They had a story they wanted to tell, a twist they wanted to incorporate, or a scripted scene they wanted to act out, in other words they were inspired to make it, and the results were inspiring. This 5% of content is probably 90% of what players remember. In WoW, probably 50% of the content is filler, the rest is all "good" content. The best evidence of this is the sheer number of easter eggs to be found. Easter eggs get into a game when someone is inspired to tell a joke, and over-worked world builders facing a quota don't have much of a sense of humor. Blizzard put a huge number of people to work building content, and gave them a lot of time to do it, and that is where most of their budget went. But it paid off. However, WoW is not a perfect content-oriented MMO, there's still a lot of filler in there. What would it take to really do it right? Probably about twice as much. Let's throw around some numbers here, stictly pulling them from where the sun doesn't shine: Figure that the average player puts in 20 hours a week. Figure that to put together "filler" content by hand you're looking at a 1 to 1 ratio, 1 hour of content builder time builds enough quests/encounters to keep the player occupied for 1 hour. Now, how long is your treadmill? If it's 500 hours played, it will take the average player 6 months to reach, which up until WoW was the target most were aiming for. Now, if you have multiple classes or realms, you're going to lose efficiency here, not quite completely to the point that you just divide your efforts by the number of classes, but a lot. Call it 25% efficiency for a guess. To generate enough content to keep the players occupied for that long, you're looking at 20 x 4 x 500 = 40,000, or about 20 man-years of content building. At $50K a manyear, that's a million dollars invested. Now, that's if you're building "filler" content. What if you're trying to fill a game entirely with good content, that will keep the players not just occupied but entertained? Then you're looking at a lot more time, time spent scripting NPC behaviours, carefully laying out monsters, time spent staring at the walls figuring out what this encounter/quest is going to be about and how it will be entertaining. Say that 20 hours work will entertain a player for 1 hour. You plug that number into the formula above, and what comes out the other end is 400 manyears, which coincidentally is about twice as much as Blizzard invested (rumor had it that they put 100 people to work building content 2 years before the launch). So now we have the math that explains why WoW is about 50% "filler". If we naively scale that up, then "WoW done right" would have a development budget of about $50M (rumor is that they spent $40M at launch, but $15M of that was marketing and launch costs). Now, these numbers are all just guesses, but some mathematical formula like this one has to apply (actually, since WoW has a shorter treadmill than most games, I suspect my numbers of hours to produce "good" content is too conservative, or my efficiency of realms/classes too optimistic). So, the cost of a content-driven EQ clone where all of the content is designed to be entertaining is $50M, give or take a bit. The economics of MMO's under the standard business model say that for every $1M you put in, you need to sustain 10K subscribers for 2 years to recoup your investment. That means that properly executed content-oriented MMO's need 500K subscribers to make money, in the post-WoW market. There's certainly room for quite a few of those, according to my long-term projections. So if you've got $50M+ to invest, building content-oriented cumulative character MMO's (I'll explain that term in my next post) is a viable way to go. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Sun, Jun 19 2005 8:23 AM Updated: Sun, Jun 19 2005 4:20 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

Interview on CorpNews By Dave Rickey on Observing the Obvious The Corporation asked me to answer a few questions about what I've been up to lately, and what happened at Mutable Realms and Mythic. Since everybody already assumes the worst about why I left both companies, I figure I might as well get some of it on the record. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Thu, Jun 16 2005 4:02 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

Note to Democratic Party: Stop Being Wimps By Dave Rickey on Random Noise Why do the democrats feel like they need to apologize and disassociate themselves from Howard Dean saying that the republican party is ""¦pretty much a white christian party" ? It's not an insult, it's a statement of fact. The GOP is 84% white christians, according to their own statistics. So why the hell is every democratic senator, congressman, and dogcatcher acting like he just called them the Klu Klux Klan? Yes, I'm watching The Daily Show on TiVo right now. The democratic party needs to stop being ashamed of itself. Yeah, you just got your asses kicked, but you're not going to fix that by being hyper-sensitive to the feelings of people who think "liberal" is synonymous with "communist" , and haven't gotten the news about the Cold War (BTW, it's over, we won). Stop being so damned afraid to stand for something. And that's the core problem with the democrats right now: They don't stand for anything. Environmental issues, labor issues, civil liberties, corporate oversight, they pretty much take everyone who thinks those are important for granted, just because they aren't as bad as the republicans. About the only issue they'll take any kind of stand on is abortion, and even there they sometimes waffle. Dammit, I'm not some kind of far-left wacko. I think both parties left to run things without interference would be disastrous, which is why I want the democrats to grow a spine. Right now the only piece of the Bill of Rights that is safe is the Second Amendment, and although I'm a firm believer that gun control means using both hands, I'm a little worried over the ass-reaming the 1st, 4th, and 6th are taking lately. Democrats need to stop running scared of the "Liberal" label, and make the word "Progressive" mean something again. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Mon, Jun 13 2005 5:59 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

I Think, Therefore I Am By Dave Rickey on Bouncing Reality Checks Okay, starting about 2000, I got curious about the psychology of the players. This led me to start reading up on sociology, group psychology, sociobiology, behaviourism, neuro-cognitive theory, and a variety of related subjects. Sociology and post-behaviourism psychology were mostly a bust, but sociobiology and neuro-cognitive theory had some really strange things. Here's the most interesting things: There are certain severe forms of epilepsy that treatment requires severing a neural structure called the corpus callosum, this is essentially the bridge between the right and left halves of the brain. Experiments where these people perform instructions that can only be seen by the left eye (and therefore only perceived by the right brain) yield an odd pattern: The subject will invent a reason why they patted themselves on the head, turned off the lights, sat down, etc. The right brain has no access to the speech centers, and the left brain has no knowledge of why they did it. And they will believe their invention, they'll pass a polygraph on it. The neurologists can measure the initial neural impulse that leads to a physical action, for example twitching a finger. And through a really clever experiment involving noting the location of a dot on a moving disc, they can measure exactly when the conscious awareness of the decision to twitch the finger occurred. The interesting thing is that the "action potential" that leads to the physical action comes approximately one quarter of a second before the conscious "decision" to twitch the finger. IOW, the impulse to twitch the finger starts, and then, while this impulse is still being propagated down the spinal cord, the conscious mind "decides" to twitch the finger. The process you think of as "thinking" is an ongoing process of remembering thoughts. At any given time, your mind is thinking hundreds, perhaps thousands of different thoughts, and the ones you are aware of are the ones that are picked out of this babble and remembered. Here's the punchline: You are a lie you tell yourself. An ongoing fiction you're making up as you go along. What you think of as your "self" is just a collection of memories that manage to get brought back into "working memory" on a regular basis. Some levels of your thoughts will normally never be accessible to your conscious awareness, and this isn't just "autonomic" functions like your heartbeat, but things like why you're attracted to certain people, why you have an occasional craving for pickles, or why certain outwardly pointless repetitive actions feel rewarding and fun (which brings us back to MMOG's). Often, our rationalizations are just that, explanations we've invented to make it feel like some action initiated by a level of thought we're not in touch with was actually a conscious choice. This is why asking players why they had "fun" with a given game sequence is an excercise in frustration, because the player is not actually aware of why they had fun, the sequence tickled their brain reward systems, and then they made up a reason for their conscious mind. 1 Reference Comments Keep New: Posted on: Mon, Jun 6 2005 1:55 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

A House Divided Against Itself By Dave Rickey on Fighting Words How can you tell when an MMO developer is sitting on a lot of cash? They start trash-talking the business viability of the industry. Damion must have gotten some funding. That being said, XBox Live does offer a crappy deal, if you're not wholly funded by Microsoft like Sigil, or big enough to browbeat them into offering a better deal like Square, there's nothing there for an MMO. Giving Redmond control of your oxygen supply by letting them control the revenue and the physical servers is a recipe for self-destruction. In fact, the only case I know of where not having development, billing, and operations (including CS) under one company has not worked out badly for all concerned is NCSoft and Cryptic (City of Heroes). And I wouldn't expect that to keep working if NCSoft America started getting desperate to justify to NCSoft Korea's $150M investment. Not that the guys in charge at NCSoft aren't good people, but because in corporate politics, good people usually don't last long once the knives come out. Otherwise, not running all three of those under the same leadership has usually led to either buyout, or re-acquisition, or irrelevance. And XBox Live hands all of billing and most of operations to Microsoft, which isn't likely to work out well. Trying to maintain and update a game when you aren't allowed to touch the servers is a nightmare, as Damion has good cause to know. And he's right about the installed base of consoles, as well. People don't buy add-on hardware for a console unless they know they want to play a game that absolutely requires it. So for an MMO developer, they either have to hope that they will have a "must play" title that people will go out and buy wireless network adapters for their consoles to play, or confine themselves to selling into the comparatively small installed base of network-capable consoles. XBox 360's built-in wireless probably will help with that"¦except that the XBL deal sucks, and Microsoft had better start throwing a lot more money around if MMO's are going to be a serious part of their strategy (or loosen the terms). Frankly, I expect PC's to dominate MMO's for about a decade, and vice-versa. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Tue, May 24 2005 12:31 AM Email This Clip/Blog This

The Devil and CmdrSlack By Dave Rickey on Bouncing Reality Checks Grimwell has a theoretical analysis of the current legal state of virtual property. I'm not qualified to critique his analysis, but I think I can translate the key points: Sooner or later, courts are going to recognize the value of virtual stuff, with all of the implications for liability, divorce settlements, and income tax that implies. They'll *probably* recognize that the items are not property in the same sense as physical objects, but are highly specialized and situational in value, and require restrictions on handling in order to preserve the context from which their value derives (IOW, if the legal status of virtual property renders the games the property exists in impossible to operate, the property will have no value, and courts are unlikely to create or sustain that situation). Much of how this shakes out depends on how well current precedent on the validity of EULA's stands up. Linden Labs is trying to have their cake and eat it too, granting players property rights, but absolving themselves of any liability or obligations where those rights are concerned. Sony's hairsplitting that what is being bought and sold is a limited liscense to control the "items" inside the context of the game has at least the surface appearance of being valid. Much may depend on how effective the Station Exchange is at eliminating fraud by supplanting the outside markets (both for Sony, and for the larger questions of operators rights to control the virtual item trade). Grimwell has their own forum discussion of the article, and I'm going to follow Terra Nova's lead and point to it, turning off comments on this post. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Fri, May 20 2005 2:04 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

Customer Service Is A Waste Of Time By Dave Rickey on Bouncing Reality Checks Brian kicked out the notion that customer service doesn't matter. I thought I'd respond with an even more modest proposal: Customer service as we know it is a waste of money. Consider: CSR payrolls can easily suck up just as much money as ongoing development. How much more could be done to make the game better if those resources were dedicated to development? Perhaps CS aids in customer retention or in good word of mouth, but how much would an equal amount spent on marketing add to the newbie stream? Conversion and retention rates for some games have been highest when CS quality was at it's worst: During launch phase, CS responses run days or weeks behind, yet conversion rates can run 10-15% higher than they will later, after CS catches up. Maybe the way that a lack of CS forces the players to help each other is actually better for business? Every customer service request costs money, a routine request that takes only a few minutes to resolve typically costs $1-2, a complicated harrassment situation or a "sandbox fight" over who has the right to fight what can easily suck up $100+ in CSR time and overhead. Two requests from the same customer in the same month wipes out all your profit from them, and a frequent flier on harassment or name complaints can cost you thousands. Perhaps the proper business response to a CS ticket is to ban every account associated with the call? Obviously, I'm not seriously suggesting that we do away with CS completely. But we may want to examine how effectively we're spending the money, and how tolerant we're being of our frequent fliers (those who lodge more than 1 CS request a month). The majority of our players will submit a CS ticket once or twice in their entire time playing a game, but most of the volume is generated by a comparative handful who need constant assurance of how important they are to us. Much more reasonable would be to let each player have a certain number of CS requests, maybe 3 or 4 in their first month, and 1 for each month after, and possibly even let them "bank" them against future use. But most of the tickets CSR's are currently handling have no good resolution, the player can't get what they want, or is just griping about a gameplay issue or bug. Not that the developers don't need that info, but getting it from CS isn't really a very effective way of closing the feedback loop. And it's costing us a fortune. We could exempt bug reports (generally they don't need an immediate response, but are just categorized and tabulated), and credit back for quick-resolution things like being stuck on geometry. And maybe even give them the option of paying for requests over quota. But the CSR qeue as a bottomless well to dump complaints in just isn't working. There's a reason why no online game company runs an 800 line anymore, even for tech and billing support. If the player calls on their own nickel, odds are pretty good they have a real issue, and if it gets resolved they'll probably sign up for or renew a subscription (given that they just paid for a long-distance phone call). Tech support, policy enforcement (anti-cheating and harassment investigation), "game stopping" bug resolution, these are well worth spending CSR time on (and time does equal money). But you get the behavior you reward, and paying attention to whining and calls for attention is rewarding it. UPDATE: Here's another way to look at it; If you have 1 CSR for every 5000 players (a pretty high ratio for the industry), then the CSR's have about 30 seconds for each player each week (28.8 to be exact). After your CS request has taken up 30 seconds, you're eating into the time for some other player. And it can take more than 30 seconds just to check the request out of the qeue, read it, send a chat message to the player, and get a response (usually "wait, fighting" ). There are ways to improve the efficiency of the process, but they start with the radical notion that players are not entitled to a real-time interaction with an employee any time they want it. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Fri, May 13 2005 5:12 PM Updated: Sat, May 14 2005 12:29 AM Email This Clip/Blog This

Growing Pains By Dave Rickey on Bouncing Reality Checks Okay, I've talked before about the growth of the MMOG market, specifically the US/European MMOG market. For those of you just joining us, it has been 60% annually since the release of UO in 1997. That's seriously fast growth for any business, and it's why, less than a decade after the typical online game company had between 5 and 10 full-time employees, we now have several with more than 100, and dozens with 30 or more (including aspirants). It's also nearly all from one particular kind of game: The boilerplate fantasy RPG (dragons, demons, swords, spells). The three major games that are not boilerplate fantasy (BPF) have copied their basic gameplay structure from the most successful BPF's, Tank/Nuker/Healer group synergy, with a nod to other traditional archetypes like the stealth-based thieves and the "all punch and no chin" light tanks, and elder game content oriented around large-scale cooperation against hugely difficult (but very limited in variety) opponents. Aggro control, crowd control, AE herding, buff management, the same tactics apply across all of them. So, we've got a very specific gameplay formula, that has been highly refined, and turned into a commodity. It's working for us, business-wise, but how long will it continue to deliver the exponential growth? Probably not much longer. This is more gut feeling than rigorous theory, but I feel fairly confident of it. We'll soon be on a basicly linear growth trajectory, adding around 1.5M to 2.5M subscribers a year for the next decade or so. At least for the next 5-6 years, and probably 8-10 years, this growth will be dominated by Fantasy and Sci-Fi RPG's. Around 2012 to 2015, we start showing the symptoms of a saturated market, with reduced absolute growth and single-digit annual percentage growth. At the end of it (around 2018 to 2020), we'll have a total market size of around 25-35M subscribers, and a total dollar value around $7B to $10B annually (maybe as much as twice that, allowing for inflation and refinements of the business model). And I wouldn't be that surprised if not a single one of the current major companies in the market is still around in recognizable form as a serious contender, certainly not more than one or two will be. Basicly, I think I've figured out why WoW blew my predictions out of the water: It represented the transition from "Early Adopter" to "Early Majority" , and that was an event horizon my prior models couldn't see coming and couldn't see beyond. In the process, I've come to the conclusion that we have several other markets waiting in the wings, currently in their "Innovator" stage of development, much smaller and growing in a linear fashion, and therefore being mostly ignored in favor of the Big Money represented by the BPF's. More on that later. 1 Reference Comments Keep New: Posted on: Thu, May 12 2005 6:31 AM Updated: Thu, May 12 2005 8:31 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

Procrastinated Equine Necro-Sadism By Dave Rickey on Best Things In Life So I completely missed out on the latest resurrection of the Permadeath debate. I could wait for it to come around again in a few months, but I have never been very good at impulse control. Besides, I think I actually have something new to say about it, which is hard to do with a horse that dead. What if permadeath was just for people playing on a free trial? You could do anything you could do in the regular game, but if you died, you got a pop-up: "You are dead. You can restart with a new character, or upgrade your account now." Yes, essentially this is "Insert $14.95 to continue". Why not? Everyone complains that those few major games that have free trials lock away all the good stuff, gameplay wise and visually, so why not open up everything? You can play where-ever you want, do whatever you want, but if you die, you either start over or pay up. Just a thought. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Sat, Apr 16 2005 5:20 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

Taking The Short Bus To B-School By Dave Rickey on Bouncing Reality Checks All my life, I've had a pattern: I lack the patience for formal schooling, the closest I ever came was my technical training in the Air Force, where they crammed about 4 years worth of electronics into 9 months, which was almost fast enough to make me work at it. Almost, my standard pre-test training regimen involved blowing curfew and getting drunk while singing karaoke (imagine a 6"²1"³ 220 pound guy with a crew-cut and a voice a full octave below what is normally considered bass singing "On the good ship lolli-pop" , complete with Shirley Temple dance routine. Did I mention I was very drunk?). I effectively dropped out of school in the fourth grade, although I didn't get around to making it formal until I was 15. Oh, and I'm not paying for the therapy to get that visual out of your head, so don't ask. Obviously, I'm not a good candidate for an MBA program. Getting spoon fed tidbits, 90% of them useless trivia meant to pad out the lesson plan and trip up people with bad memories and no note-taking skills on the final, for 2 freaking years? Hell no. Never mind all those useless "breadth" requirements, if I want to know something about ancient Hindu poetry, I can find out more on the Internet in 3 days then they'll teach in 6 months, and I won't have to outguess what the professor thinks is the "right way" to interpret it. So I'm forced to try to educate myself. Anyway, I've been reading up, "The Complete Idiot's Guide to MBA Basics" (really, I heartily recommend that and the For Dummies series as a first read for any complex topic, you won't understand it when you're done, but you'll start to understand the nature of your ignorance) along with The Portable MBA and some other books meant as primers or refreshers for MBA aspirants. This is all based on my theory that for any field of human endeavour, there are a half-dozen core concepts, and once you understand what those are, and the relationships between them, everything else is just filling in the blanks. One of the conclusions I've reached is that we have failed to understand the business we're in. Last week's brickbat for the TV execs was based on my realization that once you strip away the form of these games, their function is to help people kill time. Most americans and western europeans (and apparently Asians, this may be a universal for anyone not a subsistence farmer) have roughly 30 hours a week to kill, pure leisure time that is not occupied by work, personal fulfillment efforts, or family obligations. We provide them with a way to do it, in a pretty efficient and accessible manner, that doesn't cost a lot (if you assume that they already have computers and internet connections). Another is that we've misunderstood the nature of how we do that. We're providing an entertainment service, not a technology product. We make our money from subscription fees, and sometimes from fee-for-service arrangments outside of the subscription. Putting boxes on the shelves is only a step in that process, and possibly a disposable one. But we're acting like, and structuring our businesses like, the box is what we're selling, and the technology is what we're providing. Bullshit. The box on the shelves is part of how we build our customer base, we shouldn't give a damn if we make a dime on it, in fact if we can find a way to build that customer base that involves us spending money to get the customer, rather than trying to make money right off the bat, we should probably take it. Boxes on the shelves are about attracting new customers or drawing back old ones. And live services are about keeping the ones we've got. Customer service keeps wagging the dog because they understand that, where the development side is in love with the new and the shiny and only wants to focus on that. The fact is, almost no expansion that has ever been created for any online game has any reason to exist as a boxed product, except to the extent that a graphical revamp required more new client-side content than could be effectively downloaded. Even so, a bare-bones CD mailer sent out at $1 or so a customer is quite possibly a better way to have done it. And most (around 90% these days) of our customers are on broadband and could download anything much under a gigabyte without a problem. Could get expensive in the bandwidth bill, but a bit-torrent style P2P distribution network like that Blizzard is using (but without the home-router hating attributes) could fix that, easily enough. New boxes should be major efforts developed in order to radically increase the gameplay options available, of such scope as to rival or even eclipse the original games. Not just a bunch of client-side content to back up some more of the same-old, same-old server side content that almost exactly like everything that is already in the game. Not that you shouldn't have that kind of expansion, just that it shouldn't be a boxed product. What you should have is more of what UO has sometimes done with their expansions, putting out what was essentially a new game that happened to share technology and background with the old. Say what you like about Renaissance, it essentially created a whole new UO to play, and in the process probably saved UO. Ditto for T2A. The latest samurai-themed UO expansion seems to be in the same vein, for that matter. CoH seems to be the only new game getting this right, City of Villains is essentially a whole new game, offerring all new gameplay, trading on and extending the CoH setting while not stepping on it. To the extent that any other game has done this, they've done it wrong, putting it out as a hastily thrown together, primarily server-side patch. At a strategic level, Live patches should be about retaining current customers, boxed expansions about drawing new ones or bringing back old ones. Yet the strategy for both has been exactly the opposite (the tactical execution of Live patches has generally gotten it right with game fixes and small gameplay extensions, but tactics are strictly short-term). Major Live patches (sometimes termed as downloadable expansions) have been planned based on what is making customers leave, or go to other games instead of start on this old one. But potential new customers rarely hear of them, and mostly neither do old customers who might be tempted back. Meanwhile, boxes are put on the shelves full of more of the same, and get extremely predictable sales because 90%+ of the current subscribers buy them (retailers love MMO expansions). But except for shinier screenshots, there's nothing there to draw in a newcomer, and there's nothing at all to interest someone who got bored of the gameplay and went elsewhere. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Thu, Apr 14 2005 8:17 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

Note To TV Exec's: Stop Being Idiots By Dave Rickey on Random Noise I've commented before on how MMO's seem to be in direct competition with TV watching. The average American spends 28 hours a week watching TV, and this is so normal that nobody even comments on it anymore. Of course if you find yourself with some time to kill, you turn on the TV and try to find something worth watching. We're on the third generation that was raised by the output of the TV networks. But MMO players spend 20 hours a week playing their game of choice. There's been much hand-wringing in certain circles about how their life must be suffering, losing friends, jobs, and so on. But, it turns out they're just not watching TV, Nick Yee's polling indicated that the thing that gets shorted for MMO play time is TV watching. Instead of passively sharing in lives that are much more interesting than our own, we're diving into a world much more interesting than our own. This would seem to set up a conflict between media that we've been through many times before, with newsparers, radio, movies, and TV. A new form of escapism has arrived on the scene, one with inherent advantages over the old. And, as before, it doesn't mean the old is going to go away. In fact, it might even get better. MMO players still watch 7-8 hours of TV a week, what they don't do is watch crap. No soap-operas, no Friends or Seinfeld re-runs, no Movie Of The Week unless the story premise seems really interesting (and it's an original, not something they've already had the chance to see in theatres or on cable). But they'll still watch a new episode of CSI, Deadwood, the Sopranos, or the new Battlestar Galactica. They'll still watch good TV shows, it's just that there aren't a lot of them to watch. Almost everything on TV has been dumbed down, watered, focus-grouped, and think-tanked into this pitiful tasteless mush that nobody cares about very much. Most of it isn't even new, it's re-runs (even a new series only has episodes for a third of the year, the rest of that year will be re-runs and pre-emptions). 90% of this crap is just supposed to sustain your time-killing daze, rather than draw enough attention that you might actually change the channel, or even worse turn the TV off and go do something. When I look at what I actually watch consistently on TV, most of it isn't on a broadcast network, but instead on a cable network, where the FCC's morals police can't touch it, or even on a pay network like HBO or Showtime, where even the sensitivities of advertisers is a non-issue. Even MMO players will watch TV that doesn't suck. Stop trying to deliver the widest possible audience. Stop churning out mindless sitcoms and cop buddy dramas and give us something with a little kick. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Sat, Apr 9 2005 9:50 AM Updated: Sun, Apr 10 2005 2:57 AM Email This Clip/Blog This

It's Quiet. Too Quiet By Dave Rickey on Random Noise Well, I'd feel guiltier for not having posted in a week, except nearly everyone else went silent at the same time. I've been busy, been exploring the Torque engine, talking with my partners over how we're going to make VHR pretty. My piece of it has been exploring the world-building, I've figured out that although Torque's world-building tools are capable of some beautiful results, they're buggy as hell. In fact, they are buggy in the exact same ways that they were when I was playing Tribes 2. Nobody wants to work on tools. There's a heirarchy in game programming: Rendering Engine > AI > Game Systems > Architecture > Networking > UI > Tools. Everyone wants to be higher on the ladder, the tools are the absolute least interesting to work on and are generally given to the least experienced programmer, who does everything he can to get moved up to something more interesting. Since everyone else is dodging UI work, usually he winds up there (but he won't want to stay there, either). So it shouldn't be surprising that no one has bothered to fix blatant bugs in the Torque world-building tools in the last 3 years. Or that the GUI building tool is almost as bad. But it's sure a pain, I'm left with a choice of fixing them myself, extracting the data and building/using other tools, or just do the best I can with them (they are usable, just flaky and unreliable). That, at least, was easier in ordinary software development. Since none of the work was particularly interesting, you could assign someone a piece of it and expect them to finish it, since the only satisfaction and hope for recognition they had was to do it well. But no-one wants to do a good job on tools or GUI work, because then they might get stuck on it. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Sun, Mar 27 2005 12:48 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

Make A Desert, Call It Peace By Dave Rickey on Bouncing Reality Checks For the last ten years, the PC game industry has been eating its young. Publishers have kept developers on a milestone treadmill, never more than a few months from collapse. In some ways, making a successful game is the worst thing you could do, one way or another you would wind up owned by your publisher (if not through buyout, then being squeezed into bankruptcy would hand your IP to them, and they then hire who they think they need). At any rate, it's been a rigged game, where a handful of hits supported a broad spectrum of failures, and nobody really made money but the publishers. All of it fueled by the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a never-ending stream of computer geeks who thought it would be neat to work on games. Along the way, the price tag of making the games has mushroomed. 10 years ago, $1M was a lot to spend making a game, now it would barely get you started. Most of this comes from bigger teams, working for longer. This also means that there isn't nearly the sense of personal investment in the results, a team of 10 can all have a voice in the design and gameplay of a product, a team of 40 cannot. This is dampening the wide-eyed enthusiasm. The 2 to 4 year development cycles also mean that if you wind up working on a project that doesn't interest you personally, you're going to be on it a long time. Just another set of reasons why the industry now sucks. But it doesn't have to be that way. Lately I've been checking out Garage Games. A year or so ago I wrote off the Torque engine as an option for online games, because the engine came along with a commitment to use Garage Games as a publisher, and they weren't set up to handle a subscription game. Now they've got a new "Commercial" liscense without the strings that costs more (but still far less than even NDL's Gamebryo), and comes with an impressive suite of tools (basicly 90% of the functionality you'd get from the Unreal or Doom 3 engine). And in the course of doing so, it struck me: With the capabilities of that engine, and the resources (art and otherwise) that are now available at places like Turbo Squid, you could make a game that would have qualified as AAA quality 3 or 4 years ago for less than $100K. Maybe considerably less. I'm considering dusting off my design for a Total Annihilation-inspired RTS and putting it together, just as a familiarization excercise. So an independant game that never hits the shelves probably won't sell more than 20K no matter how good it is. So what? Had these resources existed a year ago (and if I had known about them), I would probably have spent my severance from MR building a game. What we've got here is an opportunity, to create a new industry, a new business model, a new development culture. Hire on artists for cheap, have them build assets for your game, and then let them sell the results to whoever wants them. Have outside programmers solve your problems, then sell or give away the solutions. Let's really go Hollywood, the good side of Hollywood. The big boys are hyper-competitive, all retreating into their fortresses and forcing their employees to disengage from the communities. They're turning out slightly different versions of the same games, they do need to worry about losing competitive advantage because their people talk to each other. But independants have nothing to lose, there are so many possible games to make, it's actually better for us to call our shots, that way everyone else knows to steer clear. No point in going head to head with somebody, when you can just make a different game, oriented on different gameplay. And so what if the horse models we use for VHR turn up in someone else's Wild West game? We got what we wanted from them. If we get them cheaper because the artists can sell them to someone else, that's great. Yeah, it's a radical concept, if we don't own the visual assets, what do we own? What, am I some kind of communist? Has building every piece of every game from scratch really served us all that well? Has owning every bit of it, only to throw it away been a good use of our resources? Are the budgets that approach requires strangling the last vestige of innovation out of our trade? Then let's stop playing the rigged game, quit trying to make the AAA title, and settle for single A. The fact is, the publishers are burning their bridges in the PC games market, and in a few more years they're probably going to walk away from it. The only PC games you'll see from major publishers will be ports of console games. So, the publishers have turned their backs on the talent, the people who make it happen. They've turned their backs on their core market, the hardcore gamers who want each game to be something new. They use us, abuse us, and toss us aside like a dirty kleenex. Then to hell with them. It's talent that makes the money tree grow, so in the end it's their loss. I'm not talking about free software, or starving for our art, I'm just talking about not striving for a carrot the publishers are never going to let us reach, anyway. Let's do well by doing right by each other. If we make the games that deliver the new gameplay, with halfway decent production quality, the players will come. Maybe not for the first game, or the 5th, but the more decent games that are made that never show up on store shelves, the more people will stop expecting that to be the only place to find a decent game. Especially after the mainstream industry has been turning the AAA market into a wasteland of derivative, pointless, shinier versions of the same games we've been playing for 5 years. So quit whining about how there are no decent games being made, how everything costs too much and takes too long. Be part of the solution: Go to Garage Games, or PopCap, or somewhere else, find a game that looks interesting that is never going to show up on the shelves, and buy it. Hell, buy two, most of them are $20, you can't tell me that you never spent $40+ on a game in the store that turned out to be crappy. If it's good, tell your friends about it. Take a chance. Join the Revolution. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Mon, Mar 21 2005 11:39 AM Updated: Tue, Mar 22 2005 1:37 AM Email This Clip/Blog This

Broken Clocks By Dave Rickey on Random Noise Every once in a while, I make a prediction or two about where the industry is headed. However, I've never followed up on those, simply made them and waited for the results. Some of them were almost inevitabilities (predicting that the MMO market will continue to grow is like predicting the sun will rise in the east), others were riskier. Two of my most daring predictions were that MMO play was going to noticably impact TV ratings, and that broadband providers were going to start getting involved in online games. Well, Nick Yee's surveys are backing up the TV prediction, showing that MMO play time does seem to come directly out of TV time, and Comcast has come to my rescue on the other, offering ToonTown at a discount. You could also argue that WoW has fulfilled my "Graphics Plateau" prediction, but Blizzard has always been the exception to the rule on graphics, getting huge numbers with technologically dated graphics. One data point does not make a trend, but it is suggestive. Anyway, like the broken clock, I was right twice. Let's see how the rest of this plays out. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Sat, Mar 19 2005 9:09 AM Email This Clip/Blog This

Okay, I Was Really Wrong By Dave Rickey on Random Noise Okay, I'm still a little skeptical of their numbers, simply because if they mean what they seem to be saying, WoW is getting a 94% conversion and 0% churn. That just seems a little too good to be true. But WoW is bigger than I thought it could be, it's definitely exceeding my most optimistic curves for overall market growth. It's official, WoW did grow the market (if it hadn't, every other game would be dead now, at least that piece of my prediction held up). At this point I would normally say something snarky about how they'll all get bored and go looking for something better. But I think I have enough egg on my face right now. I'd offer Blizzard my congratulations, but I think the noise from all those armored truck engines delivering their money hats would drown it out. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Thu, Mar 17 2005 2:40 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

The Code Is The Law By Dave Rickey on Fighting Words In the past, I've argued that designers needed to know code. Not just know basic programming principles, but have worked on real projects as part of a team, understand what it's like to wrestle with a compiler bug at 3am. So I ought to line up with Cory Ondrejka at Terra Nova when he says the code is the equivalent of notation. But I don't. Our games are built from code, but our games are not code. To put it in appropriately technical terms, the space of games we can design, versus the space of games that we can actually implement, are not the same. You can (all too easily) design a game or system that cannot be effectively coded, that's why I think designers should have better programming chops than has traditionally been the case. And the same system can be implemented as code in a frightening variety of ways, which would easily defy someone looking at the source from realizing they were looking at the same game. Even a description of the rules in logical terms can be misleading, as the example offered in Rules of Play for Tic-Tac-Toe easily demonstrates. I'll talk some more about that example in this conext soon, but for right now my point is that games are design implemented through code, and simply studying the code is an even less useful way of analyzing them than simply categorizing their explicit rules in prose. UPDATE: Raph's slides from the presentation are up on the Theory of Fun website. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Tue, Mar 15 2005 7:15 PM Updated: Thu, Mar 17 2005 1:32 AM Email This Clip/Blog This

Everyone Is Entitled To My Opinion By Dave Rickey on Observing the Obvious John Dvorak is pointing out that blogging is a niche activity. Even when blogging is encouraged by employers, less than 1 in 100 will take advantage of it, and less than 1 in 10 of those will remain active. I'm not really surprised. It takes confidence verging on arrogance to put your opinions out there as being worthy of attention in an effectively anonymous environment. Anyone who has ever run a popular message list or a web discussion board can tell you that the lurker/poster ratio typically runs 50 to 1, or more, and the lifeblood of any forum is generally a half dozen people who are ready to chime in on just about any subject. Look at what we've got here: I'm committing my words to print, in a form where I cannot control who will read them, or what they will say about them in their own blogs, or in private IM's or emails. Doubtlessly, some of them ridicule me for what I say. But I don't really care. My ego is so armorplated after 12 years of active participation in internet discussions, it's pretty hard to say anything that will really get under my skin (still a few touchy subjects, let's not go searching for them, please). I literally do not see it anymore, I filter it out at the eyeballs and it doesn't register mentally at all. Somewhat more problematic has been the sensitivities of employers. I've had more trouble with bosses over the things I've said online than anything else. They like the fact that I can play the evangelist and get people interested in games through sheer force of rhetoric, they're not so happy when the loose cannon lets out with a blast or two that hits them close to home. In retrospect, I had to wind up in a position pretty much like the one I'm in now, my status as "Resident Malcontent" was never more than making the best of a bad situation. But I'm unusual. Most people can't overcome the sense of exposure and embarassment enough to post online, even more could never imagine trying to defend something they said to the person who signs their paycheck. It's not surprising that most people in the industry don't have much of an online presence anymore, and not surprising that most of those that do don't dare say what they really mean. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Tue, Mar 15 2005 3:02 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

The Plural of Fun By Dave Rickey on Bouncing Reality Checks For years, there has been one major problem for everyone who would like to systemize game design and critique, to create a structure that could encompass every possible form of gameplay and relate them to each other. The problem was: Define "fun". In exact and unambiguous terms, tell me what fun is, where it comes from, why games can create it, and why it goes away. Tell me why Jack and John can play the same game, and one has fun and the other doesn't. Tell me why they can play the same game, both have fun, but in entirely different ways and from entirely separate parts of the game. Where does this magical property "fun" reside in the endless lines of computer code, file lists, and pretty pictures? A competent movie director can tell you exactly why the final scene in "Ole Yeller" can make grown men cry like a baby, why one movie set in WW2 (The English Patient) is a "chick flick" while another (The Dirty Dozen) is a "macho movie" , and even why a third (Saving Private Ryan) is popular with both men and women. Why successful action flicks almost always have sequels, and romantic comedies almost never. But even Will Wright, one of the best designers in the business, can not tell you why men play The Sims like little boys torturing insects, and women play it like little girls with a dollhouse. Fun strikes like lightning in games, appearing and disappearing before you can blink. This game has it, this one doesn't. That designer creates the hottest, most addictive and innovative game ever, and then never produces anything remotely playable ever again. This sequel to a hot title comes off like a pale imitation of someone else's clone of the original, even though it has the exact same team. Even the handful of theoretically "bankable" designers have an appreciable number of total duds and disasters in their credits list. Fun is like obscenity, we know it when we see it, but we can't define it, and we can't all agree about what it is and isn't. Design maxims like "make sure it's fun before you make it pretty," and "look for the fun in the premise, then focus on it," become meaningless whenever the number of people in the discussion passes 2 or 3, because there's almost no chance they will agree about what, or where, the fun is. Add in a few marketers and suits that don't play games and wouldn't know fun gameplay if it bit them, and you have the game industry of the last decade. What has been missing is a solid place to stand, a demonstrably and irrefutably true example of fun, any fun, any kind of fun, in reductionist terms. Until now: In "A Theory of Fun" , Raph Koster provides a very specific, clear, and unambiguous definition of "fun" as brain reward for recognizing patterns. He provides numerous examples, from the simple children's games of "got your nose" and tic-tac-toe, to the complex strategies and options of Grand Theft Auto. He also describes why this fun goes away: The brain, having mastered the recognition of the pattern presented, no longer finds it interesting. He is in my opinion, correct but not complete. Even so, he provides the "solid place to stand" to describe other kinds of fun in equally exact terms, and potentially to categorize them in relation to each other. Please note that this is not a review of the book, if that's what you're looking for go here or here. First, let me run through a few examples of when I have had "fun" in games, where those experiences were clearly not the same "kind" of fun that Raph is talking about: Sitting with a fishing pole near water in Ultima Online, EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, and World of Warcraft. Some how even the minimalist representation of "fishing" encompassed in a few mouse clicks manages to be soothing and calming, yet fun, in very much the same way that real fishing is. Playing Tribes 1 at 3 o'clock in the morning, Broadside map CTF, light midfield skirmisher. While launching out of the ring valley like a frictionless bearing with a rocket pack, I see an enemy dropping down the other side of the central mound. I fire a round from the disc-launcher apparently aimed into the ground. Without even tracking the shot I know that between my velocity, that of the launcher, and the inevitable ski path of the enemy, I already have a hit, and I turn to control my landing on top of the enemy base. Sure enough, just as I touch down, "Soandso catches a frisbee of death from Mahrin Skel's Disc Launcher". Arguing policy with the rest of Skye Front command staff in MPBT, I convince them that we need to create a uniform training regime for our units, similar to the "Boot Camp" I've been using for my regiment. The deciding factor is when I and two of my better trainees basicly kick their butts all over the map in one simulated mission after another. As you can see, there's not any pattern-matching going on here, to the degree there are patterns they are all fully mastered patterns, not relevant to the experience except as a foundation. What they all have in common is that they were all fun for me at the time. Not just a little fun, but enough to make a mental impression that has lasted for years. What Raph is describing is a particular kind of fun, specifically "neophilia" , or the love of novelty. I understand this kind of fun, I'm a strong neophile myself, and it's probably a common condition among game designers. But although it is definitely in my opinion a valid theory of fun, it cannot be complete because there are types of fun that do not involve pattern-matching, or that persist long after after all patterns have been defined. What makes it a particularly important theory, however, is the explicit referencing of brain reward in the theory. Cutting 200 pages of short sentences and pictures down to a few words: Raph's theory of fun is that it is a form of brain reward that evolution has found useful in shaping the way our minds work. Rewarding us for finding patterns encourages us to look for patterns, and that is possibly the unique human property that separates us from animals, what we are using all that extra brainpower for. All animals can connect cause with effect through behavioristic conditioning, but people can identify causes for effects that are many steps removed, and comprehend patterns that at first glance appear random and disconnected. This is a "good trick" in evolutionary terms, and fun as Raph defines it is the subjective experience that goes along with it. This is important because it is a theory of fun that is useful in the engineering sense. At last, we have a definition of fun that lends itself to analysis and objective measurement. We can define means for achieving "fun" , develop methodologies for measuring it, agree before and after the fact about what fun is, where it comes from, and why it goes away. At least, we can as far as neophilia goes. However, if neophilia is evoluntionarily useful brain reward, is it possible that other forms of fun are as well? The initial evidence of this would seem to bear that out. Animal play, for example, has been repeatedly shown to be related to either fighting or reproduction (seems that all entertainment is either sex or violence, doesn't it?). Other forms of "fun" , to be evolutionarily selected, would have to relate to either sustenance, reproduction, or fighting. There's been a lot of research into the evolutionary underpinnings of "innovation" or "curiousity" , and to make a (very) long story short, what it comes down to is that neophilia is an evolutionary "sport" , sometimes used as an example of "group selection" in humans. It is not usually healthy for an individual to be a neophile, but it's very good for those around him, who can learn from his mistakes and successes. But most people are not neophiles, rather the reverse they are neophobes, they distrust and fear change by reflex. But it's more complicated than that, people are also prone to imitation, and when an innovator is not immediately struck down for his impudence, most people can see whether he has gained from it and will imitate him if they can (and will enjoy doing so). So, what other activities might have evolutionary underpinnings that lead us to interpret them as "fun" ? Looked at in that light, my three examples become: Meditative joy from physical activity that provides a reasonably consistent reward Performance at a level of excellence Social grooming and maneuvering for dominance Perhaps my categorizations are wrong. My point here is that each of these represents a particular kind of fun that is definitely not related to neophilia, but can be traced back to particular sources that can be recognized across games, or even outside of them. We need more of this. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Mon, Mar 14 2005 4:14 PM Updated: Mon, Mar 14 2005 11:33 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

You Must be THIS Tall To Kill The Dragon By Dave Rickey on Fighting Words There's an ongoing argument in MMO design circles about instanced spaces versus persistant (and cohesive) worlds. The debate rarely goes anywhere, because neither side of it is being frank about what they want from their approach, but rather they focus on what the attraction of it is to the players. Back at the first AGC, when this debate was first getting going, I had an epiphany while watching Richard Garriott's "coming out" presentation for Tabula Rasa: I was witnessing the first true "genre split" of MMO's. On one side, you have the frustrated authors, who want to craft and direct a user experience, and on the other side, you have the tiny gods, who want to create an environment where unexpected things happen at the instigation of the players. I'm pretty solidly on the side of persistance, but I dislike the debate being framed in those terms. All of these games persist something, even if it is no more than a win/loss ratio. The question is one of what persists. In EverQuest style games, the only things that persist are the characters and the stories created by the developers. The character is the only part of the game where what the player does has persistance, they take their character through the content created by the developer, picking and choosing what pieces of it to attach to their character while it travels down the tracks towards uberness. The "footprint" of the player exists only when the character is logged in. It extends actively only as far as their longest range attack, and passively as far as they can be seen (you could also argue for a "vicarious" aspect that extends through chat space into their guild channels and any private communications they conduct). In the UO style of game, the player has a much larger footprint, both active and passive, and much of this footprint remains even when the player is not online. A player's "active" footprint includes things like vendors, their passive footprint includes their house and its decorations (and their "vicarious" footprint can include books inside of the game). The viewpoint of those arguing for instancing is based on the idea that content is hand crafted, created by a developer in an effort to tailor and direct the player experience. The problem they want to solve is how to keep the players from stepping on each other's user experience, and when they discuss the strengths of the instancing approach their arguments are all bent to that purpose. The viewpoint of those arguing for world persistance is that the most interesting things in the world are the result of what the players have done. They don't want to control the user experience in any direct way, if at all, rather they want to create a fertile sandbox where the players generate their own experience, and the interactions of those experiences defines the overall player experience. In its most extreme form, instancing amounts to embedding a single-player or small multiplayer game into an MMO environment, essentially a serialized Diablo with Battle.net replaced by a much prettier 3D environment. There's nothing really wrong with this, it's a perfectly reasonable way of dealing with the imminent disappearance of the boxed PC games market. You get a lot more money from each player than you would from a box sale, you don't have to split nearly as much with the retailers, and your business planning is based on a predictable revenue stream rather than milestone payments. The world approach is more about the promise of these games as a new medium, rather than their ability to contain an old one. It's harder, and a lot trickier, but it's a fundamentally different experience than that provided by a traditional PC title. Obviously I am on the "World" side of the fence, but not completely. I think it's perfectly reasonable to embed serial content into a world, and in fact it's probably a good idea, as a form of "training wheels" to give the players a direction to take until they are comfortable enough with the environment to direct their own experience. But I think that points out the way in which one approach is inherently "larger" than the other. A World can contain a game, or many games, but a Game cannot hold more than a static, reduced-dimension snapshot of a world. I can even imagine embedding an entire level-treadmill game inside of a world, simply as a way of commenting on and parodying that kind of game. So what we have is two different kinds of MMO currently being lumped together, and as a result we're arguing over whether persistance or instancing represents the future of MMO's. The answer is "Yes." Comments Keep New: Posted on: Mon, Mar 14 2005 12:13 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

Been Down So Long, Looks Like Up To Me By Dave Rickey on Random Noise There is a certain essential freedom to being totally screwed. It means that nothing you do can possibly make it any worse. Greg Costikyan's piece of the Game Developers Rant session was absolutely perfect, I wanted to grab a torch and a pitchfork and storm EA headquarters (UPDATE: Greg's got his speech up, if he ad-libbed I can't see it). The entire industry is completely and totally screwed up. Unrecoverably so, there's no way to make anything worthwhile out of the existing model, we'd be just as well off burning the whole mess down and starting from scratch. Where's E.T. when we need him? I didn't come away from GDC with any funding. What I came away with was even better: The realization that I didn't want any. What deals there are to be had in the current market aren't worth having. It's mostly variations on "You make the game, we'll make the money." Some of them don't want to talk any deal that doesn't amount to "You have a game, now we'll take the money." Microsoft only has one offer: "We are the Borg. Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated." EA does a pretty good job of camoflaging their version of that, but anyone with an eye for history knows what path they will lead you down. There's no way to get money to make a game right now from any source inside the industry that doesn't involve signing a contract that includes clauses like "Right arm, left leg, firstborn child, and your hope of salvation." So, we're totally screwed. Huzzah! We've got a game that makes money, we've got some internal capital, we've got a plan on how to take those and bootstrap our way up. Let SOE and Microsoft and Mythic and Blizzard pile up money and burn it while they chase Teh Shiney in the top 25% of the market. We'll go carve out a nice little niche in the bottom 25% with something different, aimed at a target too small to even register on their radar. I used to think that if you didn't have $5M+, you were wasting your time even trying to get into online games. eGenesis and Three Rings have proved me wrong, there is room at the bottom, in fact there's a hell of a lot more room down there than at the top. Right now the pay-to-play game market is over half a billion dollars a year, and it's been growing at 60% a year for nearly ten years. Project that forward 2 years, and we'll blow past PC games like they are going backwards (which they are). Project it forward 5 years, and we start closing on console games (which are comparatively pretty flat). This is a big freaking pie to split up, and there's room for a lot of little slices. Is it ambitious to think that a novel, unique, and interesting online game can garner 1% of the PtP (Pay to Play) market? Hell, even Anarchy Online emerged from the worst launch in history with more than that, and its sole claim to novelty was "EverQuest, but Cyberpunk". Yet by the end of this year, 1% is going to be closing on $10M of annual revenue. The fact is that we monetize a customer at a far higher level than single-player games do, even under the standard business model it's around $200 a year per player ($160 from subscriptions and another $40 from an expansion) where even the most bankable sports franchise is reaching for $50 (and splitting it all with the retailer down the middle). And some of the alternate business models blow that out of the water, the CEO of Linden Labs claimed that they were making $1.3M a month from just 23K players, that's $600/year/player. MTGO quietly sits there and makes 3 times that, selling virtual pasteboard at the same price as the real thing. It's raining soup, excuse me while I look for my bucket. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Sun, Mar 13 2005 4:26 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

Will Wright Gets The Good Drugs By Dave Rickey on Bouncing Reality Checks I don't literally mean that he is consuming controlled substances (if he is, a lot of people would like to know which ones). I mean that he seems to spend most of his time in a state of mind that some people spend a lot of money and time jetting all over the world to take part in tribal rituals involving odd plant extracts and self-mutilation trying to achieve. He's nuts, but it's a kind of inspired, brilliant, creatively fertile insanity that I can only stand in awe of. There are a couple of other designers like that, where only in my wildest dreams can I imagine myself ever being in the same league with them. And that's a problem. There are only about 3 or 4 really good designers, who consistently turn out novel, interesting, fun games (although not always commercially successful). And there aren't any standards for judging the competence of a designer, or a remotely agreed upon means of training them. The degrees in game design that are being offered are really degrees in level design, and I'm sorry, if you need two or four years of college to figure out how to design levels, you're never going to be able to design a game from scratch that will hold my attention for more than 30 seconds. Maybe you can "design" the next version of Battlefield or Madden Football, but not the next Battlefield or Madden, if you follow my meaning. Never mind the next Katamari Damacy, or even the next Dune 2. And we don't have anything resembling a working apprenticeship tradition, either. You can't go and study at the feet of a master game designer, learn your craft, and then go off to make good games. Or, more precisely, you can try, but it doesn't seem to work very well. Will Wright has his interns, Peter Molynieux takes on one "apprentice" a year, yet none of those people ever seem to go on to do anything much, away from their mentors. I learned a lot of game design at Mythic, but I did it the same way most seem to: The way the cat learned to swim. We have nothing resembling a system of game design. I'm not talking about formulae, I'm talking about simply having some kind, any kind, of way of discussing games without discussing them in terms of other games. Raph Koster had a good panel on that, about how we need a system of notation for talking about game designs and analyzing them, without all of the content trappings that accompany a particular implementation of a game mechanic. Now I'm normally pretty down on talking about games in artistic terms, but I think this is a matter of craft, not art. I think he's dead right, if we can develop a notation form for game design, we'll be able to get a lot more systematic and effective at making them, and stop wasting so much damned time doing things that are obviously stupid in retrospect. Not to mention recognize when we are doing the same obviously stupid things in a cosmetically different form. Incidentally, we'll actually be able to try to create Art. I'm not sure how I feel about that, since I don't really think I personally have the capacity to be much of an artist. But there's a good long while to go before we've mastered our craft, and I think I can have a lot of fun with that process. I'm just going to try to be a competent game designer, and for now I'll put the whole question of "Art" on the back burner. A competent writer can take a hackneyed story idea and give it enough of a twist, or at least interesting enough characters, to make it into a readable story. A competent movie director can take a ridiculous concept for a movie (Kangaroo Jack, anyone?) and make a watchable movie out of it. But right now, the best any of our designers can do is make a game they personally find fun, and hope that enough people enjoy the same kind of fun they do. This is just not right. A competent game designer with a mature craft to draw on should be able to design a fun game that contains little or nothing he personally enjoys, and yet still carries the mark of his personal style, and take pride in the result. The fact that no one can do this yet is the strongest argument I can put forward for just how immature our craft is. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Sun, Mar 13 2005 3:12 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

Comments Unlocked By Dave Rickey on Random Noise I've turned on -pre-moderation of comments and turned off the requirement to be registered and logged in to comment (although the comment block still says it). Anybody can comment, but it won't show up until I approve it. Registration wasn't working properly, and the spammers were still managing to post, so I'm trying this. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Sun, Mar 13 2005 7:33 AM Email This Clip/Blog This

Balance Shifts By Dave Rickey on Bouncing Reality Checks In 2004, the entire PC US game market was around $1.1 billion. On the other hand, the PC-based MMOG market was around $500 million (some of which, the box sales, was also counted towards PC game totals). If 2005 continues the growth in MMOG's (60% annually for the last 6 years), and the decline in PC games (10-15% annually for the last 5), then this will be the year that MMOG's are bigger than PC games (at least, if you count the MMO box sales only once, and for the MMOG's). If not, 2006 certainly will be. 5 years ago when I told people that MMOG's were going to take over the PC market, people looked at me like I was nuts, 3 years ago they listed off long litanies of reasons why MMOG's were just a passing fad and the PC market was going to bounce back bigger than ever. A year ago I made the statement that in 5 years calling yourself a "PC Gamer" for anything but MMO's would be like calling yourself a "Mac Gamer" now, and there weren't a lot of arguments. If you're a PC game developer, this year is probably your last chance to jump off the sinking ship. Either make an MMO, or get into consoles (consoles are a much safer bet, but an MMO is your last chance to escape the gravitational pull of the publishers). Comments Keep New: Posted on: Mon, Feb 28 2005 9:37 AM Email This Clip/Blog This

Help, I'm Addicted To Breathing By Dave Rickey on Bouncing Reality Checks You know, my heart wants to reach out towards outfits like EQ Widows or those whose stories are portrayed at EQ Daily Grind. These are certainly heartbreaking stories of neglect and emotional abandonment. Having a loved one grow more and more distant, apparently retreating into a fantasy life you don't comprehend, has to be frightening. But in the end, it's "I feel for you, but I can't quite reach you." When your life sucks, you look for escape. That escape can be a hobby, it can be an affair, it can be a religion, or it can be a game (video or otherwise, "Football Widows" is what EQ Widows were referencing with their name). And a lot of people have lives that suck. I'm lucky, I get to do work I find interesting, fun, and satisfying in nearly every way I could hope for from a career. Once upon a time, I sat in a cubicle all day to grind out code for insurance rating software, web servers, and "business applications" that other poor schmucks got to sit in even smaller cubicles and use all day. And in my spare time, I was either pursuing sexual relationships (like most twenty-something males) or playing online games. I still play online games, and I still enjoy them for a time, but I use them up fairly quickly. Once I've figured out the systems as a player, I analyze them as a designer, and then I'm done. Some games, I don't even bother to actually play, I just read websites and message board posts about them looking for the small differences between them and the extremely similar games I've already squeezed dry. My life doesn't suck, and I don't need to run away from it. For roughly 99.99% of the people playing these games, all they are looking for is a way to kill a little time. If they weren't playing, they'd almost certainly be watching television. Most of those heart-wrenching stories are really about relationships that were coming apart at the seams, and a significant other that is blaming the thing they don't understand for it. Some of the others are almost undoubtedly fiction, some of them are almost word for word copies of similar stories from bygone years about television, romance novels, bowling leagues, and Coca Cola (after the cocaine was removed from the formula, no I am not making this up). So what is our moral responsibility to those people who genuinely neglect their real lives to the point that it is reminiscent of extreme drug addicts (if they even exist)? What are we supposed to do about it? And this is where I just lose interest, because I don't believe anyone has a responsibility to protect other people from themselves. I'm a smoker, I know it's bad for me, I know I'm physically and psychologically addicted to nicotine, I know that I am significantly shortening my life expectancy with every drag. But I chose to start smoking. I choose to continue. Someday in the not too distant future, when I can afford a few weeks of clawing at the walls and snapping at everyone in the vicinity, I'll quit. But the responsibility is mine, not the tobacco companies for selling me the product. Maybe someone who started in the 50's or 60's, when cigarrettes were advertised on TV by doctors, can claim ignorance of the eventual consequences. But the first pack of cigarrettes I bought had a Surgeon General's warning on it. So, should we put a warning label on our games? What would it say? WARNING: IF YOUR LIFE SUCKS, THIS GAME WILL NOT FIX IT Comments Keep New: Posted on: Sun, Feb 27 2005 8:13 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

RSS Feeds are Hard By Dave Rickey on Random Noise I have managed to fix my RSS feed for articles, but not for comments. I'm probably going to have to fix it back for WordPress 1.5.1, so I'm going to ignore it for now. UPDATE: I've also been messing with the template, the old one blew up all over the place. This one will do for now. UPDATE2: If you want my RSS feed, you need to go to this link, the wp-rss2.php handling was broken in WP 1.5. My logs are showing a lot of people trying to pull the old feed. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Sat, Feb 26 2005 5:38 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

Dance With The Devil By Dave Rickey on Bouncing Reality Checks I've spent a great deal of time pontificating about why the secondary market isn't going away, and that we need to do something to come to terms with it, but I haven't talked much about what we can do about it. Here's our options: We can do nothing, and hope it all goes away We can continue to try and sweep back the tide We can form partnerships or give concessions to the brokers, or set up as brokers ourselves We can go completely over to the Dark Side, and just sell stuff directly to the players rather than making them jump through content hoops We can do something unexpected Obviously I'm not a big fan of options 1) and 2), and I certainly don't have to try and convince anyone to try them. IGE and some other brokers would like us to go for Door Number Three, grant them a concession to sell virtual items in return for a percentage of the take (most of them would probably like an exclusive concession). Most game companies prepared to do something besides stick their heads in the sand or send in the lawyers like the fourth option, figuring that if stuff is going to be sold, we might as well take all the money rather than just a percentage. I don't like either route 3) or 4), for a variety of reasons. For the concession, especially an exclusive concession, I think that this does more to give the brokers a handle on us than vice-versa. The availability of stuff is a function of system and game design, and paying the farmers is the broker's largest single expense, sucking up about 60% of their revenues as near as I can figure out. Once we're in bed with them, and getting paid based on their profitability, the pressure to skip the farming stage and just create the items by pulling them out of the bit bucket is going to be very strong. In fact, the broker actually has a subtle disincentive to control the behaviour of the farmers, because the more unpleasant they are, the stronger the case for dropping them out of the loop entirely. And that leaves us little reason not to just skip all the middlemen and sell stuff ourselves, adding the cost to your next subscription billing. But I think the lure of this is a poison apple. If we're creating items and currency out of the bit bucket and selling them, we have incentive to do two things: Limit the player's ability to acquire them through normal gameplay, and jack up the price to as much as the traffic will bear. You can go a long way with this, and some games do it already, but it doesn't change the fact that your over-riding design imperative is how to extract as much cash as possible, not how to improve the entertainment experience you're providing. And the fact that the large-scale uses of this have been fairly innocuous (even if what you're selling is just a special pet or unlocking a character race, you're selling it) doesn't change the fact that they are the first bite of the apple. It's a dangerous path to walk down. And either way, all those nasty liability questions come back and bite us, it's hard for us to stand by the disclaimers in our EULA's about lack of responsibility for Bad Things happening to characters and their stuff, if we sold them to you (or took a commision from whoever did). So, what is the "unexpected" thing we can do that will let us focus on making better games, give us a handle on the secondary market so we can curb its more objectionable practices, and still allow it to go forward, while insulating us from liability? It stems from the greatest weakness of the broker's business model, the way that buyers can dispute the charges and not have to pay. The answer is: Blind Escrow. Imagine that for a nominal, and fixed, fee, you could put one (1) item, or a certain amount of currency, into a virtual lockbox on the game servers. This then gets "locked down" , you can't open the box without a key (say, twenty or thirty unique digits of random alphanumerics). And you can specify who gets the key. The server will also generate one-time verification keys for whoever is holding the main key, so others can verify they have it. When the key is used and the box unlocked, all three parties get notified of the custody chain (including the real names attached to the accounts). The person who puts it in the box may be a seller, or just someone who wants a safe place to tuck items/gold for transfer between characters or accounts. The person who initially gets the keys could be the same one that put it in the box, or a separate escrow agent. And the person who uses the key and gets the item may be a buyer, or the very same person, extracting his item from storage. As a game operator, we don't have to know or care. If they are conducting a sales transaction, all parties have an audit trail to show that the item was transferred, so they can prove it to yet another party (like a credit card company or the IRS). If we as operators notice that a group of characters seems to be engaging in anti-social behaviour in order to acquire items or currency that later gets placed in a lockbox, we have a strong position to lean on the parties involved to excercise control. And if we want to designate certain servers (or certain items) as trade-free-zones, we can do that by not generating the lockboxes on those servers (or letting those items go into them). And we have no direct financial stake in any transactions that may have been enabled by the lockboxes, and are no more legally liable for the results than we are for accounts that are permanently transferred by paying us a service fee to change the registered account holder (at least one company does exactly this). And anyone trying to engage in these transactions without access to the lockboxes is in a very bad competitive and business position, wide open to fraud on either end. This does not completely close the virtual property liability issue, but it lets us deal with it more directly without giving away the store if and when things wind up in court. I need a legal analysis of this whole scenario, but my legal consultant has been too busy playing WoW, so I'm throwing it out there to see what people think. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Sat, Feb 26 2005 4:06 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

Silver Tongued Devil and I By Dave Rickey on Bouncing Reality Checks In what is quite probably the longest comment thread Terra Nova has ever seen, the debate over the secondary market has apparently finally been joined by a primary source: Patrick of GamersLoot, a fair sized broker. Unlike Jonathan Yantis, he's coherent, and unlike Steve Salyer, he is not giving us meaningless PR babble. Not that he's getting a warm reception. Or maybe a little warmer than he wanted, he seems to be about as welcome as a skunk at a picnic. A lot of people seem to have a visceral reaction to the brokers, a lot like that of many people to pawn brokers or lawyers. Anyway, more on this later, I've got a notion kicking around my head for how to deal with all of this. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Sat, Feb 26 2005 1:50 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

Blizzard Invents "Sliced Bread" , Players Think it's Nifty By Dave Rickey on Bouncing Reality Checks All Your Subs Are Belong To Blizzard. Okay, I was wrong. As recently as 3 months before launch, I was saying WoW was good for 350K subs in the US/European market. They beat that in the opening week for both the US and Europe. From the looks of it, they also did it in Korea. I doubt that 750,000 US subscriber number is active subscriptions (5-10% of all the boxes sold never become registered accounts, this is probably the 50K difference between sell-through and subscribers). If WoW is getting anywhere near the normal conversion and churn rates, they are somewhere between 440K and 550K for US subscribers, handily putting them over the 435K peak of EQ1 without even thinking about Europe. Again, if past experience is any guide, this is probably their high-water mark for the US, or close to it. Europe looks like it's going to be just as big, so it's a fairly safe bet that WoW will either be the first game to pass the 1 million mark in the US/European market, or it will come very close. I say "if past experience is any guide" because past experience is what told me that WoW would only get 350K. That number was based on a pessimistic estimate of overall market growth, unless WoW has cannabilized a lot more from the previous games than has ever been seen before, what I should have been using was the optimistic projection. Oh, and I should mention that my wife bet me that WoW would break 500K, so I am now her slave. UPDATE: To explain how I get the 440K-550K number, what I've done is looked at the Blizzard press releases and figured that they sold 400K in the first month, and 200K in each of the last two months. Normally a game would fall off more in the third month, but Blizzard was having a hard time stuffing boxes and putting up servers fast enough to meet demand, so I can buy that it took a while for everyone to get their copy. Probably by now they've caught up. So 400,000 x 0.70 (a slightly below normal conversion rate) = 280,000 x 0.90 (a slightly higher than normal churn rate) = 252,000 * 0.90 (next months churn, so we can factor for after the third-month subscribers have converted) = 226,800 of the first months subscribers still there at the end of next month. 200,000 x 0.70 x 0.90 = 126,000 of the month 2 subs still present at the end of month 4 200,000 x 0.70 = 140,000 of month 3 subs after their free month runs out. 226,800 + 126,000 + 140,000 = 492,800 - 50,000 (the boxes that never became accounts) = 442,800 Run the same math with conversion rates of 0.80 and churn rates of 0.94 (slightly above the best ever seen in the industry) and you get: 400,000 x 0.80 x 0.94 x 0.94 = 282,752 200,000 x 0.80 x 0.94 = 150,400 200,000 x 0.80 = 160,000 282,752 + 150,400 + 160,000 - 50,000 = 543,152 Comments Keep New: Posted on: Fri, Feb 25 2005 5:47 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

Jack Thompson is a Poo-Poo Head By Dave Rickey on Observing the Obvious I spotted a link on Broken Toys to Jack Thompson's latest interview, where a lawyer who has built his practice on blaming entertainment companies when people, especially children, do something bad that can be vaguely linked to a movie, song, or video game, gives "just the facts" on how everything you see about juvenile violence on the news can be blamed on Grand Theft Auto. What bothers me is that the media even gives this guy airtime. Yeah, he gives good quote, and he looks good in a suit, but they don't even try to challenge his bullshit, or ask the most obvious followup questions (like: If there were three times as many violent deaths at school in 2003 as in 2002 or 2001, what happened in 2004?). Or boggle at the statement "Kids took guns to school for 200 years in this country without turning them on one another." Yes, no child ever did anything so awful before Pong and Spacewar taught them how to relieve their frustrations by killing at random. But what made me blow my gaskets was his declaration that "we predicted Columbine on NBC's Today eight days before it happened" . For those just joining in on the "the devil made me do it" hit parade, Jack Thompson was on TV explaining why the movie "Basketball Diaries" was responsible for the shootings in Paducah, Kentucky. Before everyone decided to blame Doom for the shooting in Columbine I'm not sure Jack Thompson had ever said the words "video games" on camera. And they blamed Doom, not, say, a local school administration that felt that picking up kids and dumping them in trash cans or shoving their heads in toilets was just youthful high spirits and the victims should stop calling attention to themselves and bringing on the abuse (did I mention I went to Junior High in the same neighborhood Columbine High was later built?), or the multiple psycho-active prescriptions the shooters were on because their HMO decided that drugs were cheaper than therapy. Here's the thing: We can't ignore Jack Thompson, the bastard sues us every chance he gets, and he's far too effective as a lawyer to blow off. But we shouldn't dignify him by trying to engage him in rational debate, because the man is intellectually dishonest and morally bankrupt. The next time someone asks me for a response to something Jack Thompson says, my entire response is going to be "Jack Thompson is a poo-poo head." Comments Keep New: Posted on: Fri, Feb 25 2005 4:33 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

If I'm Awake, I'm Working By Dave Rickey on Observing the Obvious Spotted at Jeff Freeman's, who spotted it at Steve Ince's: Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work. I've known for a long time that after 60 hours a week, you might as well shoot your team in the head as keep them working. They'll be generating negative productivity, making mistakes they'll have to fix later. But I hadn't realized that even 60 wasn't sustainable for long periods. I buy it, both because of the logic involved and the comprehensive citations. So, I think I'm going to be arguing for a firm "40 Hours" policy, save the 60 hour weeks for when they are absolutely essential. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Thu, Feb 24 2005 7:13 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

The Devil Wants to "Do Lunch" By Dave Rickey on Bouncing Reality Checks I wasn't expecting to get many people reading my blog so quickly, but apparently people remember me. I don't know if they're coming for my pithy prose, or they want to see me self-destruct from a front-row seat, but I'll try to make it a good show, either way. So Jeff Freeman and Abalieno have some arguments with my "Let's all be friends" proposal for dealing with the gold brokers. There's basicly three reasons for opposing the secondary market: 1) The secondary market undermines the egalitarian nature of the game worlds. A variant on this is that if games are supposed to be environments where everyone is to undergo their own version of the Hero's Journey, being able to buy your way to the end is incompatible with that. 2) The gold brokers themselves are unsavory parasites with no regard for their suppliers, their customers, or the game operators. The secondary effects of their ruthless pursuit of profit are incompatible with proper management of the games. 3) The legal implications of assigning real value to game items are sweeping and potentially incompatible with the needs or desires of either players or operators. First of all, let's look at where the market comes from: There are things in your game that are useful, to some degree difficult to acquire, and transferable from one person to another. This is all that is required to foster a market in virtual stuff. To eliminate the market through game design would require that there be nothing of value, or that anything of value be impossible to transfer from one person to another. This includes characters, so logging in is going to require some kind of biometric scanner. Character to character trades will have to be impossible. In fact, since they can also sell services, players will have to be unable to help or affect each other in any way. This is a pretty extreme set of design restrictions, in fact it's hard to imagine how you could make such a game and have the result be anything other than the "Very pretty chat room" that Warren Spector claims is all these games are (I think this reductio ad absurdum demonstrates pretty well that he's wrong). And even that might not be enough. So if eliminating the market through game design is impractical, what about doing it through wording and enforcement of the EULA? That's what we've been trying to do, and it isn't working out so well. Even if we were able to change the market from grey to black through the passage of laws and regulations making violation a criminal matter rather than merely civil or contractual, the practice will continue, based out of national jurisdictions where the laws are not as restrictive or enforcement is impractical. Some would jump in at this point and say that regardless of whether the practice can be stopped, the imperative to do so is so strong that it is our moral, legal, and artistic responsibility to do everything in our power to do so, and restrict it to the maximum degree possible. So let's look at our objections and see how they stand up. 1a) The market undermines the egalitarian ideal fundamental to the value of the playing experience. In what universe can you view these games as egalitarian in nature? From the character classes, to the advancement systems, to the fundamental inequalities of individual effort and ability, these games are all about dividing the haves from the have-nots. I have the Uber Halberd of God Smiting, you have the infinitely inferior Butter Knife of Rat Slicing. I am the incredibly influential leader of The Catassers of the Apocalypse, 300 members strong, you are part of the Working Mothers of Fantasyland, all 7 of you. I am a level 1000 Doomsday Mage, you are a level 3 Basket Weaver. The introduction of real-world wealth as yet another divisor is not particularly significant, unless you have irreconcilable political or philosophical objections. Many others object to the availability of time, or the presence of personal charm, or writing ability, or fast reflexes, or the availability of broadband, as being equally unfair. Also, better hardware already allows the well-heeled to gain advantages. And the sheer scale of the existing markets makes it clear that players buying their way to power is already common, and the games seem to survive it with little effect. 1b) The game experience as Hero's Journey cannot be compromised. Every player must experience the game as the designer intended. Besides the fact that my personal "Artistic Nonsense Bullshit Meter" just wrapped itself around the pin so hard the needle is a corkscrew, even restated as "Game design is a matter of arranging goals, obstacles, and paths, to create a certain user experience," this one mostly doesn't pass the sniff test. The play experience is all about cutting our vision of "how the game should be played" into ribbons and making pretty patterns out of the results, and efforts to stop the players from experiencing our games they way they want to rarely work out well for anyone involved. The best case you can make is that buying advantage is much like using cheats and hacks, it is using tools from outside the context of the game. However, this is not an absolute objection, just as the integration of client scripting tools can make something very like hacking an explicit part of the game experience, there is no absolute reason that the trade of real cash for virtual value could not be integrated into a game. That game may be more popular, less popular, or the same in appeal, but it would ultimately be a decision for the players to make according to their preferences. I can easily imagine games with "Trade" and "No Trade" servers akin to our current PvP+/- or "RP Server" arrangements for those of different tastes, and unlike "RP Server" , this is a distinction that could potentially be made in code. And indeed, there are games that are heavily about buying your way to success, and some of them are indecently profitable. So although the objection has some validity, it's not an absolute. 2) The secondary market invites fraud, encourages antisocial behaviours by those supplying it, and gives inordinate power to groups that may not have any consideration for the effects of the trade on the games I have personal experience with this from the game operator's side, and in fact I was working for the only company ever to be sued by a gold broker for trying to stop them and eliminating their inventory. I've dealt with the angry parents who bought their 14 year old a maxed out character for over $1000, only to have the spoiled little ingrate lose all of the items and get the character de-levelled through chained together deaths. I've seen, in person, grown men reduced to tears because the account they paid hundreds of dollars for and used for over a year had been yanked out from under them by an unscrupulous seller who retained the original CD key. And as a player, I've watched teams that never communicated with anyone in game monopolize commercially valuable content for weeks on end (in several different games). This is made all the more immediate by a major broker's recent attempts to apparently bludgeon a game developer into submission by buying up all of the fan sites for their game that would sell out to them. All of these problems are real, but what we are doing now, and the options available to us on the course we are taking as an industry, will never significantly address any of them, they merely constitute a complicated and ineffective way of saying "Not our problem". Since this is starting to come back and bite us in the ass in ways we cannot ignore, it may be time to explore other courses of action before it gets worse. 3) Acknowledging that virtual items can carry real value in a legal sense carries all kinds of dangers, ways that the operation or design of online games could be compromised through the action of courts and legislatures See that light at the end of the tunnel? It's an oncoming train. This danger is real whether we acknowledge it or not, and the only thing that we are guaranteeing through our ostrich act is that when the law does get involved, we're not going to be able to shape the debate, select the test cases, or have a voice in the drafting of the legislation. Our desires and needs won't be considered, and we probably will be very unhappy with the results. Comments Keep New: Posted on: Thu, Feb 24 2005 4:33 PM Email This Clip/Blog This

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Well, for the first time in my life, I've contributed to a political campaign. The Dean campaign, of course, isn't that what all the cool kids are doing these days? But I didn't do it because it's the "in" thing. I did it because it's the first time I've seen a candidate who wasn't afraid to stand up and *mean* something. I don't agree with everything he says, I don't like labor unions for example, but I agree with quite a bit of it and at least he has the balls to say *something*. After the last campaign, Tweedledee vs. Tweedledummy, it's refreshing.

Alabama will almost certainly go Republican, so a contribution is the only chance I have to influence the next election. I really hope that Dean wins, Bush is destroying us.

Getting old sucks. 2 years ago, I found out I had a bulging disc. More specifically, I found out the reason I had been driven to my knees after taking a staircase three stairs at a time was that a disc in my lower back was bulging out and pressing against my spinal cord. For a few weeks, my back felt like it was made out of glass, then I got over it. A couple of days ago, my back was a little sore, today the only way i can stay mobile is to spend no more than 30 minutes away from a heating pad.

Dammit, I feel like an old man. I've got one lung, a messed up knee, a bad shoulder, and now my back is going out. WTF?

Been busy lately, things at work have been insane. But I need to update this thing once in a while or tell Scott he can have his storage space back. Anyway, I've recently been invited to be an author on the Terra Nova Blog, mostly academics with an interest in MMO games. I accepted, the blog doesn't have a high profile yet but it is the first forward progress I've seen in the MMO discussions since Scott "sold out". Plus it lets me air some of my more "far out" theoretical notions.

Yeesh.... One of these days I need to learn how to turn it off, do something besides think about games all the damned time. Almost midnight here, and I'm reading a book about cellular automata and artificial life.

I'm reading over at FutureNow about the fact that storage capacities are going up so quickly, in 10 years we'll be able to archive *everything*. Not just every computer file we use, but full video and sound for our entire lives.

Yeesh. There's some parts I'm just as glad to forget, or misremeber in ways that make me look less selfish, or venal. Imagine a world where you can never escape the truth of the facts.

It's a military axiom that you never know for sure that you have the initiative, but you are usually sure when you've lost it.

I'm not sure when the important locus of discussion stopped being places like Waterthread, but I know where it is now. Scott "selling out" was certainly a part of it, but another, I think, was the way that community has begun to wallow in its own hostility just for the excercise. At any rate, they seem to have been relegated to irrelevance, the important discussions are all at Terra Nova and LawMeme and other Blogs.

Which makes me wonder about cultural obsolescence. When did newspapers stop being important, new, and vital, a social force? Did anybody really notice when it happened? Then movies, but when was the last time you saw a movie that was *important* in a social sense, that drove change rather than just commenting on it?

What's it going to feel like when the Internet goes through that transition?

If I had any doubts the market was getting crowded, a few minutes googling MMO names cured that. Between WoW, Horizons, EQ2, and Mythica, all the mindshare is getting sucked up. God I hope that none of them slips their launch date too bad, if we don't get a few months of clear air, things could get rough.

Culture, defined as the tools, attitudes, and perceptions that we learn from our elders and are impressed into us by our experiences, has many of the properties of an organism. A symbiotic rider that infests the wetware of the most sophisticated neural nets ever known to exist, that bootstrapped itself up from a simple recognition system so that we could identify those that shared our genetic heritage even though we would never have met them.

Throw your imagination back a few generations. Think of trying to learn the science of chemistry in an era when few of the underlying principles that make it work were known. Chemistry could accomplish many significant things, but the process of learning it was long and complicated. finding answers using what was known was a lot of trial and error, very inefficient. Anyone who paid attention in today's high-school chemistry classes could make the greatest chemists of the 19th century feel like fools.

After a lot of work, a simple, effective, and accurate system of chemical bonds and processes was developed. Using it, any reasonably bright person can perform tasks involving the deliberate invocation of chemical reactions that would leave the greatest minds of that time absolutely stunned. Not because the person explaining them was smarter than they were, but because the "Rules of Chemistry" meme that culture granted them was so much less efficient than the one we have now.

But...maybe the person from now *would* be smarter. Not in potential, but in practice. Neuro-psychology makes it pretty clear that our conscious thoughts are actually memories of thoughts. Our mind has "working memory" that holds the ideas we're currently thinking with/about, and these ideas/memories are continually refreshed. And if they aren't, we forget them, forget that we ever even had them. The definition of an idea is, in essence, a neural activation pattern which has the properties for impressing itself upon our working memory long enough for us to become aware of it. And then it has to be able to impress itself into short-term memory in such a way that it will then be engraved into long-term memory, and *then* it needs to re-raise itself in our subconscous dreams or it will slowly be over-written and eventually fade away.

Now, look at the way we learn skills. When I first sat down to type, it was a painstaking, key by key process, that made it take hours to get out a paragraph. Now, even though I have never had typing lessons, I tip-tap-tap away at hundreds of keys per minute, I'm not even aware of the process of typing. I simply think words, and my now-trained reflexes bang out the words. Even correcting mis-strokes is pushed down out of conscious awareness, and I shift from the standard keyboard of my work machine to the split keyboard of my home machine to the tiny chiclet keys of my laptop with no awareness of the change. Neuro-physiologists have mapped out this process, and shown that when we first learn a skill, large parts of our brains are involved. As we practice more and more of the us of the skill, less and less of the brain is involved, until eventually even something as complex as typing or driving requires literally no conscious thought at all.

Our minds try to pare down ideas to their most efficient forms. But in the process of doing so, some ideas hijack the wetware, demand extra running time. They take advantage of built-in interrupts, especially those most closely connected to the first biological imperatives: Survive, and breed. Still others try to warp our perception of all other ideas. And some ideas hijack the wetware for their own version of the survival imperatives: They make us want to share them with everyone in sight. Our conscious awareness is little or nothing more than the contest between these various self-reinforcing memes, fighting for a bigger chunk of processor time in more brains. And our culture is the collective, adaptive assemblage of these ideas fighting out the same contest on a larger scale.

Our minds are not us. And yet they are, for without them there is no "us". We are not our nature, we are not our nurture, we are not our decisions, we are not our desires, and yet we are all of these things because without them we are nothing but bits of meat mouthing meaningless noises at each other. We aren't ridden and parasitized by the memes, because we *are* the memes, riding our hominid slaves through life. Our strongest meme is our own sense of self. And this sense of self is itself the extension of the next order of organization: The meme-plex, the assemblage of mutually reinforcing ideas and behaviours that causes us to shape the next generation into more like us.

Some meme-plexes are hypercompetitive. The religious and ideological meme-plexes are really bad for this. They insist that no other memes that do not support the meme-plex are allowed to run on the wetware. They are so exclusionary, they try to drive the other memes out of existence, not just in our own minds, but in those of everyone around us. They try to stamp out all contradictory, non-supportive ideas, in whatever form they may take. Because just as an organism that fails to compete is fated to go extinct, or a thought that fails to be remembered will be forgotten, a meme that fails to try and preserve itself will be driven into the fringes of human society, there to become an almost forgotten heresy, only suffered to continue because it is too much trouble to stamp it out once and for all.

The meme-plexes are at war. Originally they were tools in the hominid contest of survival, but now the hominids are tools in the contest of meme survival, and they have been for at least as long as there has been a history (in fact, history was almost certainly created as a tool of the memes, one of the means by which they elevated themselves from servants to masters). All our wars, all of our contests, are simply the visible, obvious shadow of the war of the memes. The real contest is more subtle.

But when meme-plexes push each other to the wall, the final proof of the conquest of the wetware is shown: The hominids march off to fight each other, to show which is stronger through an attempt to either destroy the hosts of the other, or to discredit and dis-integrate the meme-plex from the hosts and replace it. The outgoing meme then has to try desperate measures, taking on enough of the winner's properties to be allowed survival while still preserving itself as much as possible.

Our thoughts our not ours to command. They are our commanders. And yet without us, they are helpless, they are nothing.

"Geek" originally meant someone in a carnival freak show that specialized in biting the heads of live chickens, along with other displays of taboo-breaking behaviour (sort of like Fear Factor gross-out challenges or some other reality-show wierdness). You see, for children raised in the carny tradition who didn't have any particular talent, especially children of freak-show performers that didn't inherit the family peculiarities, there weren't a lot of career options. Women could always get covered in tatoos or perform in the hootchy-cootchy show, but for the men it was either roustabout or a job as the geek. Roustabouts were the bottom rung of carny society, beneath the pale, but geeks were bonafide performers.

Once upon a time, not all that long ago, computer geeks were the bottom rung. You just couldn't get lower on the social heirarchy. But money washes away all sins, when Bill Gates became the richest man in the world, geeks became respectable (even with a full-time staff of image consultants, Bill G. is an obvious geek). And in the society of geekdom, game designers sit pretty high, and online game designers a notch higher. So you think I would be quite proud to have reached the point where I can call myself an online game designer, and nobody will deny it.

Fact is, I'm not satisfied. I'm always pursuing the next validation, now I want to be the man out front on a successful game, rather than just standing around when lightning strikes. And after that, I'm probably going to want to do it again, but in a totally different way and for more money. And then.... I don't think the capacity for satisfaction is in me.

Sometimes, I wonder why the players want to believe. They've been disappointed so many times, they know by now that the Promised Land is *not* just around the corner. But they still keep searching, keep hoping, wanting the next game to be The One. And I almost feel like a bastard, showing off my bright shiny new ideas, knowing that they want to believe.

Almost. I don't lie to them, and I try to manage their expectations, but I'm not going to let the game tank because I'm too insecure to feel comfortable with letting them believe.

I find myself pondering my own insecurities tonight. Yes, to some extent the pompous, intellectual style I write in is the product of insecurity, big shock, huh? For a variety of reasons involving childhood traumas, I am pathologically driven to be the smartest person in the room. No matter how tough the room. It's a character flaw, but it's also a source of strength. My insecurity drives me, pushes me, forces me to stretch myself to my absolute limits.

This comes up because I was wondering why I'm always such a contrarian. When the industry was filled with speculation, handwaving, and castles in the air, I concentrated on mundane details like customer service, quality assurance, development review processes, and community relations. Now that the entire industry is focused on those subjects, I find myself irressistably turned towards more ambitious pursuits, trying to reach beyond the mundane mechanics towards the things that inspired us to start making these games in the first place.

The conclusion I come to is that the contrariness is the product of the insecurities. The key to feeling like the smartest guy in the room is knowing things nobody else knows. The key to *that* is asking the questions no-one else is asking. So when everyone else is looking one direction, I'm breaking from the herd and moving the other.

Most humans are hardwired to pursue the routine and shun change. We evolved in an environment where we weren't neccessarily the top of the food chain, and anything unfamiliar was potentially dangerous. Curiousity killed the cat, and the curious monkey gets eaten by the really big cat. But the new is also potentially useful, so the species throws out a few sports that instead of being averse to change, are actively attracted to it. A lot of them get used up, because the strange *is* dangerous. But these days that rarely happens, so we have a surplus of change-attracted people around. Even in that company, I'm an extreme example, I want to be out there one step further into the strange than anyone else.

There was a study and book in the 80's that found that successful people tend to be highly insecure. This was surprising to the researchers and the author, they felt that success should create contentment. What they failed to recognize is that those that can be satisfied don't push themselves the way you have to to *be* successful.

So, here I am.... For those of you keeping score, I took a job with Mutable Realms as the Lead Designer for Wish. It's another fantasy game, which is both good and bad. Good in that I have been working on fantasy games for a long time now, and I've got all of the conventions and history right there at my fingertips. Bad because I have had it up to my chin with elves and dragons. I've got nothing against elves and dragons, I've always been a fantasy fan, but Christ on a crutch, if I ever find myself debating the proper curvature of pointy ears again, I will scream and start laying about in all directions with a blunt instrument.

But it's nice to have some real authority, it's amazing how much easier it is to compromise in my ideas of what will make the game better when I get to make most of the decisions. It's easier to back off and be objective when I don't have to worry that the people making decisions will take the first sign of uncertainty as a surrender. And the game is not going to suck. I repeat, the game is not goig to suck.

Boy, long time no see, ehh? Well, you see, when I started this blog I promised myself I would never update it on company time or using a company connection. As a "speaking only for myself" figleaf it may be paper-thin, but they're my rules, so I get to pick them. I'm willing to tell an employer that what I do on my own time with my own resources is none of their business, and even push it to the logical conclusion, as long as I have followed those rules. Anyway, shortly after that last entry, I took a job with Mutable Realms, and I only got a home internet connection set up today. My urge to pontificate was being satisfied by my column at Skotos, and money was tight after moving expenses, so I just let it slide. So this blog has been sort of orphaned.

Anyway, I'm going to pick it up again, bloviating at the internet in general, whether or not anyone is actually still reading.

An odd thing about my trip to E3 was the way that being trappped on an airplane makes me start thinking deep thoughts. It's like all that pent-up energy of being fully awake but completely on hold until landing has nowhere to go, so it gets channelled into thinking. Anyway, I figured out the topic of my first column on the flight out, which seemed well-received by Chris and Jessica. On the way back, I found myself drawn beyond questions of how to build societies in virtual worlds, and into the larger question of how real societies function.

This was provoked by reading "Defenders of the Truth", a history and analysis of the debate over sociobiology. Until reading it, I was only vaguely aware there *was* such a debate, the essential truth of genetics influencing persona and through that culture was so obvious to me, it seemed incredible that it wouldn't have been assumed all along. Okay, obviously not. But I can, after reading that, see the point of the opposition. For starters, Wilson's postulate of an acclerating factor unique to humans that allows fundamental species change at a genetic level at 100 times the normal rate is obviously crap, a fudge factor that attempts to salvage the idea of genes being more powerful in their effect on culture as whole. It's not neccessary to his core argument that genes keep culture "on a leash", tilting and limiting the range of cultural possibility. In systems that hover around the critical points of their phase transitions extremely small changes can have big impacts, and it seems hard to see massive social changes as anything else.

The fear of the opponents to sociobiology seems to be that genetics somehow makes us robots, incapable of transcending our natures. To an extent this has to be true, if your genetics makes you highly schizophrenic or non-functionally autistic, your biology is going to trump your conditioning in a big way. At the core of their fear is this idea that if we really uinderstand what makes ourselves tick, we'll create some kind of hyper-rationalist society, in which everyone's role in life is determined at birth, our course laid and no diversions allowed, try and get off the tracks and you'll be forced to return to them, or locked away before you infect the others.

Call me an optimist, but such a thing seems unlikely. If observation shows anything, it's the incredible range of variability in human nature, the plasticity of human capability, and the perversity of human desire (I am not using "perversity" in its moral sense, but in the sense of contrariness to convention). In every dimension by which you can compare people, they run the gamut. The internet makes this much more obvious than usual, exposing you to viewpoints that you would normally never imagine. My capacity to be boggled by this long since burned out, now they are simply more data.

And the resulting pattern has meaning precisely in its boggling complexity. Whatever your position on genetic determinism, you have to admit that this incredible range of behaviours, so divorced from anything resembling a survival characteristic, the very *capacity* for such ability to escape the limits of our instincts, itself had to evolve. All of us live two existences, one physical and one mental, and the degree to which we exist as beings of one or the other is itself highly variable, not just as a species but as individuals.

I dunno, maybe I have a different perspective on this continuum of physical existence vs. mental than most. The tendency has been to declare the ascendancy of one over the other, or to deny the possibility of a difference. I have a different background from most geeks, I spent my teens living a profoundly physical existence, martial arts training, manual labor, a 3 week wilderness survival course. To me, the idea of different modes of thought isn't hypothetical, but just something I do. So although I may not be able to think in ways that encompass the full range of worldviews, I can at least grasp the existence of such a range.

However, contrary to the currently fashionable trends in some parts of academia, not all modes are equal, or more accurately they are not *equivalent*. There are standards by which they can be judged, and some of those standards *are* more important than others, or at least more useful. In the context of mental existence, it may be accurate to say that truth is a matter of social consensus, and one group consensus is as valid as another. But when dealing with the physical world, there is an objective reality that refuses to be denied. So in social terms an African tribe's belief that the moon is a calabash gourd thrown up just beyond the treetops by a cultural hero is as valid as believing that the moon is an airless ball of rock a quarter million miles away that was first walked on by Neil Armstrong. In both cases, social consensus makes it equally true, to the people that believe it.

But if there were to be a resource on the moon that we desperately needed, no amount of throwing lines and nets into the air will allow the African tribe to recover it, while the belief that it is an airless ball of rock a quarter of a million miles away would allow us to do what is really neccessary to recover that resource. Accepting the fallacy that reality is entirely consensual is just stupid. The problem is the confusion of the word "truth" with the word "fact". Social "truth" may be the product of consensual agreement, but the existence and influence of a social space where truth is consensual does not eliminate the existence of a physical space where facts are objective.

However, most people don't have a problem grasping that, but instead fall into the opposite trap, that only objective, physical, reality counts. That is equally fallacious. Most of the people who worked on the moon missions had no absolute personal physical evidence to back up the belief that it was a ball of rock, but simply accepted the consensus social reality that it was in fact so. The belief that something is true in the presence of inadequate personal evidence is as much a part of rational western science as of the African tribe, you ultimately believe most things not because you personally know them to be true from certain evidence, but because it is neccessary to believe so in order to function in your social environment, and thereby gain the resources that allow you to function in your physical environment.

Some would say that phrasing it in such terms is a distinctly "western" mode of thought, to look at the world in terms of what can be extracted from it. Bull, in fact it is only academic western society, so divorced and removed from having to struggle with the world for survival, that can afford to think of it any other way.

So why *have* I been studying neuro-psychology, anthropology, socio-biology? Well, at one level, because it's my nature, I'm an information sponge, looking for patterns and trying to build them by simply absorbing as large a mass of data as possible.

But at another, it's because there's a genuine opportunity to learn things that will help me make better games. To understand why communities form in online games, and take the forms that they do, we pretty much need to solve the problem of why they form at *all*. To understand that, we have to understand the forces that shaped our essential nature as a species.

Humans evolved as a species with a very odd niche, one without parallel elsewhere in the modern ecology: Cursory social predators (like wolves) that were also opportunistic omnivores. Primarily meat eaters that hunted in packs using sophisticated group tactics like killer whales, wolves, hyenas, lions, dolphins, we were also methodical gatherers of edible roots, berries, leaves and seeds. We can't say how unusual this role is, no other current species lives in such a niche, but after a hundred thousand years of hunter-gathering humans they may simply have been out-competed, forced into either extinction or specialization. At any rate, the competing imperatives of these two very different roles shaped our evolution for thousands of generations, and the results are stamped on us forever.

Predators have a unique viewpoint towards the world around them. Literally, in fact, predators almost always have their eyes facing directly forward, with lots of overlap in their field of vision and comparatively little peripheral vision. Look in the mirror, some say your heritage as a meat-eater is literally staring back at you.

Now look at your fingers. Fine manipulation is normally not something a predator or pure herbivore needs, it's normally reserved for animals like squirrels, racoons, other opportunistic legumifores (eaters of nuts and seeds). You start with something that is mostly inedible due to a hard, spiky, or foul-tasting shell, and peel away the inedible parts to get at the good stuff. This is how most primates (monkeys and lemurs) make their living. Apes (chimps, gorrillas, and oranguatans) are mostly just large versions of this. And almost all of these primates have the forward-facing eyes, in evolutionary terms our primate background of life in the trees was a pre-adaptation for the viewpoint of a predator. Most primates will eat meat, or at least insects as well, so our digestive systems were also pre-adapted.

So why did we become pack hunters? A very long time ago, some curious chimplike creature made a fortuitous discovery: you could crack open tougher nuts with a rock. This is not a unique trick, sea otters and some birds use a similar trick. But then some clever ancestor of ours made a momentous discovery: The flakes that sometimes fell off when you knocked rocks together were very sharp, and could be used to open up things you otherwise couldn't, even by pounding them between rocks. It looks like this is when we became hunters, using clubs to kill the prey and cutting stones commonly called "hand axes" (not like the axes you're used to, these had no handles) to cut up the carcasses and make up for the sharp teeth and claws we didn't have.

For many thousands of years, we made cutting stones. *Lots* of cutting stones. There are deposits of these simple hand-held cutters extending over large chunks of the planet, all to pretty much the same design. And here's the odd thing: Many of them were never used. More than a few could not have been used, being so tiny they can barely be held or so large they can barely be lifted. Others are made from blatantly unsuitable materials, sones too soft to be useful or too hard to shape to have been worth it for a tool. And there are too many of them, far more than the bands that created them could have ever used, and in spite of the differences in size or material they are all nearly identical in design. Somehow, this ancestor species got a collective case of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, expending huge amounts of effort into creating these perfect stone hand-axes, over and over again.

There is only one explanation for such an obsession: Making these tools became a courtship display. Like birds building nests, male ape-men spent every available moment trying to create the perfect hand-axe, to impress the girls. The modern male obsession with fiddling with tools, and the female obsession with receiving gifts from males, undoubtedly have their roots in this age. This went on for a *very* long time. At this point, mankind was still just a clever monkey, although he had a trick for tool use, it was only slightly more sophisticated than that of many other creatures.

Somewhere along the line, some genius came up with yet another clever idea: He looked at the club he used to beat the prey to death, and the hand-axe he used to cut it up, and put them together, literally. Keep in mind, for thousands of generations his ancestors had used these tools in almost unchanged form, so this was a major breakthrough.

For a very long time, this was as far as it went, a simple axe of stone bound to a stick. Then someone tried a really long stick, and a really small axe head, and made a spear. This triggered a major shakeup, the world's first arms race as this idea of rather than just slightly modifying something to make a tool, tools became something of multiple parts that were prepared separately and then assembled, and you made particular tools for a particular purpose.

In very short order, man's ancestors went from clever ape, opportunistic omnivore with a couple of clever tricks, to something we would recognize as human, spending much of his time doing things that were intended to prepare him to get food, planning ahead rather than living in the moment. His time as a pack hunter and opportunistic omnivore had pre-adapted him for this, but now the connection between preparation and reward was even more extended. Bows, food preservation, hide preparation, sewing, clothing, all of these and more were invented in a burst of creativity. Mankind became capable of looking at things in terms of "raw materials", seeing not just what they were, but what they might *become*. This is when man started seeing things that weren't there, but might be. Probably millenia of trying to outguess his prey and think of what it might do had pre-adapted him for this "what might happen if" game.

Probably this is where man started to form the social structures we would recognize as human rather than animal. The new tricks required specialization, where before bands had been divided simply between the men who hunted and made tools, and the women who gathered nuts, berries, and roots and cared for the children. This behavioural sexual dimorphism has many parallels in the animal world. But now, we probably started to have specialists, men who were particularly good at making tools and would stay home from the hunt to work on them, women who were better at sewing and would work on clothing rather than going out to gather. There were roles in the band that couldn't be performed by just anyone. Although most anthropologists place this step after the development of agriculture, it seems logical to me that something must have pre-adapted us for taking specialist roles, to accept a situation where things essential to our wellbeing were being performed by others.

At this point, man completed the development that made him recognizably human. The timescales afterwards are too short for evolutionary adaptation, everything that happened afterwards would have to have been pre-adapted during this phase. The really key elements of this pre-adaptation seem to have been:

1) The ability to imagine things that were not real, and treat them as if they were.

2) The ability to communicate these unrealities to each other.

Everything that distinguishes us from our hunter-gatherer ancestors is the result of this capacity to treat the unreal as real. All of our hard-wired properties derive from our life as primitives, everything else is flexible.

There's an old anecdote traded among physicists, the origins of which are lost in the sands of time:

A physicist was making a public lecture, and describing how the earth was a ball of rock that orbited the sun. A little old lady stood up and interrupted him, saying "That's nonsense, the earth is flat and the sun goes around it."

The physicist, bemused and not wishing to be rude to the old lady, asks her "Then what holds it up?"

"It sits on the back of giant turtle."

"Oh really? And what does the turtle stand on?"

"The back of another giant turtle."

The physicist, starting to lose his sense of humour, asks "And what does *that* turtle stand on?"

"You're a very clever young man, but I'm ahead of you. It's more turtles, all the way down."

There's a dangerous tendency to focus on these games *as* games, to assume that if you just get the game right, everything else will fall into place. I say "dangerous" necause it is simple, elegant, obvious, and *wrong*. If it were enough just to get the game right, MCO, E&B, and AC2 would all have done a lot better.

You can screw up the technical side of the game pretty bad, and still get through it, but if you don't get the community working, you're screwed. Okay, flip it around: The world is content and code, but all of this sits on a stream of player activities that give the world meaning and life. You look past the levelling curves and AI, and you have group dynamics. You look past the group dynamics, and you have guild politics. You look past the guild politics, and you have competition between players as individuals and as groups to be noticed. You look past that...and it's turtles, all the way down.

Well, Skotos has asked me to do a column for them to fill in for Jessica Mulligan. I'm going to do it, it won't pay anything but it's good visibility, and I was never good at passing up a good soapbox. But I'm going to have to be a great deal more focused and polished for this column than has been my custom lately.

This industry has never been good for maintaining a dialog, but it's been a drier spell than usual lately. Too many of the people who have participated in what dialog there was are either in the early stages of projects they can't talk about, or the big crunch right before or after a launch. And it's a bad time for the industry in general, but especially for theorists.

There are three kinds of people designing these games. Those that are ignorant, and insecure about it. Those that are ignorant, and not shy about saying so. And those that are ignorant, but not showing it in any way. That last group is the big problem with trying to move this industry forward. The guys with the money tend to give it to the people who act confident, and those that don't acknowledge their ignorance look more worthy of financial backing. The lack of acknowledgement *can* be simple cluelessness, or deliberate deception, but either way it leaves you with a situation where many of the people in charge have a vested interest in not seeing the state of knowledge about the craft advanced, because too many questions being asked points out how few answers there are, and that shakes their house of cards.

You'll notice that I'm ruling out the possibility that there might be people out there that actually know what they are doing. If there were, I wouldn't be writing this, or casting out lines looking for work, I'd be doing whatever it took to find work in their shop, to study at the feet of the master. There are people out there that know a few things I don't know, but I know enough about the state of the industry, and the scale of the amount of knowledge we *don't* have dwarfs that available to all of us in the field put together.

So we have the clueless, the posers, and the seekers. Right now, most of the industry is the posers leading the clueless. That's slowly changing, Raph and I disagree about many things, but he's definitely a seeker. Jessica is another, Damien Shubert another (there are more I can think of, but I'm going to stop simply because I can't make a complete list and leaving out one simply because I wasn't familiar with them would be an unneccessary insult). But it's rough going, and the seekers are going to have to deliver on the bottom line before it's going to give us fundamental change in how the industry puts together its teams.

Sometimes I have to ask myself if the stuff I'm studying actually has any relevance to the questions I want to answer. Why do I think that neuro-psychology is going to give me a significant insight into making online games? What use is sociobiology? I know they do, but it's based on a hunch. I read a couple of pages, and what I am reading somehow fits into a pattern. I can't explain it, but I've reached the point where I can explain *why* I can't explain.

But, being me, I first have to explain some theory. Human beings are social animals, we spend a great deal of time and mental effort keeping track of the attitudes, personality, and relationships between, the people around us. That is, most of us do. When you model social environments, it rapidly becomes clear that this is a very non-trivial problem, even for a highly optimized neural network. In fact, evolutionary biologists believe that they can determine the capacity of the human mind to do so, and come up with a number of around 150. This corresponds with the actual observed size of everything from college fraternities to hunter-gatherer tribes in New Guinea.

This is not implausible, humans have certainly been operating in bands of around that size for a very long time, in fact social cooperation is a property of most primates. That our ability to do so would be a survival characteristic and get hardwired into our mental structure is not a stretch. But then, there are the exceptions.

There's a condition known as Asperger's Syndrome. It's essentially a collection of symptoms rather than an easily identified mental condition, characterized by high system-oriented intelligence, and a lack of social awareness. I only became aware of it in the last couple of years, when it started making a lot of things make sense. The thing is, I've always had two different modes of thinking, one where I was deeply into some really complicated problem, and one where I kept track of the social environment around me. I never stayed in "People Mode" long for two reasons; the first being that it was mutually exclusive with the "patterned thinking" problem solving that characterized the other mode, the second being is that if I stayed in it for very long I got very paranoid.

Now, self-diagnosis is never very reliable, but I do not share the professional psychiatrist's contempt for it, mostly because I have too much contempt for psychiatrists. Long story, not important here. Anyway, I think it is very important that people be aware of what is going on in their own heads, and I've cultivated a self-analytical aspect, I constantly try to examine my own mental state as if it was an intellectual excercise, a puzzle I was trying to work out. Okay, it's an odd way to think of yourself, but it works for me. Anyway, unlike most psycho-hypochondriacs who are constantly deciding they have the latest fashionable condition, I don't generally talk about this. Mostly because few people seem to be comfortable with my clinical discussion of my own mental state. That being said, I'm trying to get somewhere here.

I'm starting to think that there is a direct connection between my "pattern thinking" problem solving abilities and "social awareness", that in fact they use the same parts of the brain in different ways. Trying to explain how the two are similar is almost, impossible, like the classic about explaining the color blue to a man that was born blind. But here's my best shot:

Imagine trying to write a computer program to do what a mind does in keeping track of social relationships. You would have all these various mental representations of people around, and these links between them. At one level, links would represent friendships, enmities, cliques, etc. At another level, you have all of your interactions with each of these people, every memorable conversation, every collaboration, every secret you've shared, etc. At another, you have all the interactions you have witnessed *between* these people. At the first level, you may have over 10,000 links, at the next you could have a hundred times that many, at the next you might have 100 times *that*, or over 100 million links. The problem would be insanely difficult for a computer.

But what if you had a custom-built neural network with 1 billion nodes, specifially designed and trained to handle this problem? That seems to be what human beings have in their heads, evolution has equipped us with a very sophisticated "social environment analyzer". Think about the raw correlative power of such a network.

Now imagine what else you could do with it, if it was reprogrammable hardware sitting on a desk in front of you. What if you could encode the *idea* of every sentence of every book you ever read into this network, and find the relationships between them? Figure out what ideas connected to what, build patterns out of the ideas and recognize when the shapes of the patterns were similar even though the ideas were not? Maybe every once in a while you would drop in a new idea, and set off a cascade of new connections, a wavefront of change like a crystal forming in a saturated solution. Suddenly you have this new understanding of the relationships between ideas, an understanding that may not be describable, but is neverless manifestly as obvious as 1 + 1 = 2. So obvious that trying to explain it to someone else who doesn't already have most of the same ideas in their head in the same way is an excercise in frustration.

As near as I can explain it, that's how it feels.

So I've got a lot more time to think without distractions these days, and I keep coming back to the core questions that caused me to start this blog in the first place: Who are these people, where do they come from, why do they play these games?

Well, I know a lot about who these people are now that I can't share (due to contractual obligations as part of my severance package). But I can tell you that they are pretty normal people, and that they overwhelming come from each other. People don't just stumble across these games in the store or read about them in a magazine, they are introduced to them by friends or co-workers. But the why...that is why we need theories. At one level, these games are behaviourist "scheduled reinforcement" skinner boxes. But it actually goes deeper than that.

I've been reading up on neuro-psychology lately. This field has been taking a *long* time to come into its own, they're trying to understand the human mind from the nuts and bolts level, like trying to diagnose software bugs by analysing the hardware one transistor at a time. But its starting to get there. Anyway, they're starting to get real answers, and some of them are quite intriguing.

One of the most interesting is that consiousness is just an illusion, a lie we tell ourselves so things make sense to us. For example, if I decide to move my hand "spontaneously", the nerve impulse in my mind to do so starts nearly half a second before I become consciously aware of having made the decision to do it. Much of what we do, we do without conscious awareness, because the conscious process is too *slow*. There's a lot of in-depth science about this, involving PET scans, hypnosis studies, cultivation of brain cells in the lab, poking electrodes into monkey brains, etc. "The Synaptic Self" by Joseph Ledoux, "The Illusion of Conscious Will" by Daniel M. Wegner, and "The Symbolic Species" by Terrence W. Deacon are good sources if anyone wants to read up on it.

Anyway, it was while reading "The Illusion of Conscious Will" that I stumbled across the key to this: Indirect Causation. The primary distinction between mammals and other lifeforms is their ability to *learn*, to connect cause with effect in ways that increase their survival chances, it means a heightened awareness of the world around you and the dangers it might pose. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you *smarter*. What distinguishes primates from other mammals is their high awareness of others of their kind. And what distinguishes humans from other primates is our ability to believe in things that aren't there.

A chimp can look at the world around it, and see how to use parts of it to its own advantage (including other members of its troop), but it only sees what is in front of it. It can make the connection between a stick and a termite mound, and fish termites out with it, but it can't take the next step and think of breaking open the termite mound and going after the queen and the eggs (even though it will eat both if presented with them). Certainly a troop of chimps is capable of digging out a termite mound, but they don't make the connection. Okay, gross example.

Anyway, somewhere along the line, people started believing in things that weren't there. The reason seems to be indirect causality, a human will connect causes with effects even when the causes are very different and not obviously related to effects. Some of us are better at it than others, but all of us seem to have the capacity to believe in things that don't actually exist, and by believing in them, make them real.

What is a superstition, but a belief that one thing (wearing your hat sideways, knocking on wood, stepping on a crack) will cause something else to happen (your team wins, a bad thing you just mentioned doesn't happen, break your mother's back). What is religion, except a belief in something you can not possibly know is true, with such intensity many will die or kill for it? Humans are so good at seeing indirect cause and effect, they see it even when it isn't there. At some level we are hard-wired to believe *everything* has a cause, and if we can't figure it out we'll invent something to explain it.

What does this have to do with online games? In 1997, Richard Garriott was being given a demo of Ultima Online, and was briefly fooled into believing that an NPC was actually another person's avatar while conversing with it. In 1999, a magazine reviewer was tricked into thinking EQ's AI was actually much more sophisticated by bad pathing. The examples go on and on, the point is that the players are pre-disposed to interpret what they see in the world as being much more lifelike that it actually is. From this we can draw two important principles: People want our worlds to behave more like living, complex realities; and they'll meet us halfway and believe in our worlds if we can pass some minimum threshold of "lifelike".

You know, as I read and hear about certain things in Iraq, two words keep going through my head: Operation Odessa. In late 1944, when it became clear to the SS that Germany was going to lose the war, plans were laid to get SS officers out of the country and hide them elsewhere, using funds from the Swiss accounts the SS held. Some claim that Kurt Waldheim was part of this (at one point he was in charge of the UN archives of Nazi records, many of which were "misplaced" unexplainedly). The Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Mossad hunted them for 40+ years, but many died of old age.

Every Baath party headquarters we take has most if not all of its records destroyed. The headquarters of the secret police was stripped of every piece of paper when the troops got there. Looters that break into banks find only Iraqi money in them, all foreign funds are missing. 6-10 billion dollars, maybe much more, was made off of black market dealing during sanctions. Billions more were held through shell corporations that were never tracked down from *before* 1991. The Kuwaiti gold reserves have never been found. And overnight, the entire Iraqi leadership, from Hussein and his family down to the local Baath party leaders, vanished without a trace.

The way that an entire nation, one of the most regimented on earth, can come completely unglued in just hours, is an interesting thing in and of itself (as long as you're just watching from the outside). But it's probably part of the plan, soldiers that are having to try and provide law and order at the street-corner level can't do much to stop a few thousand bureaucrats and their families, not to mention the torturers and murderers mixed in with them, as they make good their escape. By now, they are almost certainly all out of the country, except for a few that have been left behind for the wolves.

Where? Right this moment, probably Syria, but they won't stay there long. My bet is that they'll scatter, many will probably wind up in the Uzbek republics, some will try to fade into Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, and other Arab and Islamic nations, and undoubtedly some will wind up in the US. We're never going to find them all, not even the 55 that got immortalized on those decks of cards. Legends about the "8 of Spades" or "4 of Diamonds" will be the stuff of books, movies, and legends.

Boy, long time, huh? Obviously, the attention that this little excercise in vanity generated caused some difficulties for me and I had to stop for a while. Those are no longer an issue, I don't work for Mythic anymore. "Creative Differences" is one of those cliches that happens to be true in this case. I had goals, Mythic had goals, and for a long time those goals were compatible and both sides gained from the arrangement. Now we're going our separate ways, and I wish them only the best.

Anyway, it has actually been close to two weeks since then, which I've spent thinking, reading, and playing computer games. Just a period of self-examination, and evaluating my options. Which are a curious mix of very good and very bad.

On the one hand, the industry as a whole is having a hard time right now. Games keep tanking, and nobody seems to understand why. These games cost a lot of money to make, starting at $5 million and moving up quickly from there, and yet most of the games that have come out have done poorly. Hard to justify the risk if you can't be fairly confident in the payoff. It's making people antsy, investors skittish.

On the other hand, I've worked on two of the games that *have* succeeded (even if my role on the first was so minor as to barely get me in the credits), and I've been fairly outspoken about how I think the successes and failures can be accounted for. That last is both good and bad, it's made me a few enemies in this business.

At any rate, it seems that it's not a matter of if I can find another job, but what exactly that job will be. Starting my own project from scratch isn't in the cards, I lack the contacts and fundraising skills, and it's not a good time to be trying to do it. Besides, I need to develop my management skills considerably before I'm ready for something like that. So I'm going to be working on someone else's project, pursuing someone else's vision, and to be quite honest I don't have a problem with that. I don't yet know what my own vision would be, if someone called me tomorrow and said they'd back me on any game I wanted to make, I genuinely would not know what to do. I have too many questions still to answer, too many unknowns to run down.

It does bother me the degree to which designers are held in contempt by the industry, and theory in contempt by designers. Theory is our only hope to break out of this cycle of blind stumbling. I come from a background in business applications, where applications are developed to fit an exact set of requirements, and design is a process of determining a feature set and architecture that meets those requirements. Its all cut and dried, very target oriented, and you would think that coming from such a background I would be either very rebellious against structure, or dedicated to imposing it. Truth is, I'm neither. Effective organizational structures need a mixture of structure and adaptability. Too organized, and they cannot innovate, and this field is moving *very* quickly and a failure to innovate would be deadly. Too unstructured, and they can't pursue any goal purposefully.

So why do I think theory is important? MMOG's are complicated beasts, with a lot of moving parts, all of which seem to be essential. If anything, the current games are too *simple*, don't offer the players enough different gameplay options. Yet they are far too complicated for any one person to comprehend. For other businesses, even entertainment, the way out of that trap has been development of theoretical frameworks. People who design airliners or hydroelectric power plants don't understand every part of what they are building, and a lot of the "intelligence" that actually makes the systems work is closer to the edges in the foremen and supervisors on the work crews, but everyone is working to a common theory of how a working, functional version of the idea represented on the plans is put together, even if what they are building is a prototype or a one-off.

This kind of structure is painfully lacking in the game business. In my opinion, the reason why it is so much easier to create a clone than a genuinely new game is because the game being cloned acts as an exemplar, a substitute for the theoretical framework we don't have. Although the entirety of a game is impossible to grasp, people can focus on the parts of existing games that are like the part of the game they are working on and use it as a guide. Sort of, if the game they are making is at all similar to an already existing game.

However, theory has limits. At some point, the theory gets too far removed from reality, and no longer actually relates to making a better game. This has led to some extremely big, high-profile failures, which is probably why the very concept of theory in game development has become an object of ridicule. But no matter where we turn, we need theories. We need theories on how to make the games, how to market the games, how to manage the games, we need to find a framework in which to make predictions and to judge the results of those predictions. And that seems to be the core of the problem. We have no dialogue in this industry, no system of critique or body of commentary. Even waving your hands in the general direction of a clear failure in an attempt to show an object lesson of a conceptual mistake brings charges of being "unprofessional", and makes enemies. We *personalize* everything.

And this would all just be me carping about the failure of the universe to arrange itself to my preferences, except for the fact that the industry is imploding. At the same time that the raw amount of money it is making is increasing to eclipse Hollywood, the developers and even publishers are going out of business right and left. The future is offering only one way out of the trap for the developers, going online. But then you're talking about a whole new set of problems, and the design techniques favored by the industry (where designers shoot a lot of outside-the-box cool ideas at the wall hoping some of it sticks, and the responsible adults trim it down to something achievable) simply aren't going to work.

Hell, it's not like they worked all that well to begin with. For every game where that approach worked, there were a dozen where it failed, miserably.

Well, the good news is that I'm no longer shouting into the void. The world has discovered my little excercise in navel-gazing, and now links to it are turning up all over. The bad news is that some of the things I've written are being misunderstood somewhat.

If I use an example from another game, I'm *not* saying that any other game is bad, or that the people who worked on it were not skilled. I just trying to relate theory to example. All I'm working with on other games is what's known to the public. A lot of the mistakes that have been made, nobody knew or could have known they were mistakes until after they were made, some of them I'm the only person I know who even thinks they were mistakes. So please don't beat any of my colleagues about the head and shoulders over my blathering. Opinions are like.... Anyway, this field lacks mutual criticism, in large part because everything is exposed to so many eyes and things can get twisted around. Nobody wants to talk about anything with people outside their companies. I'm just trying to vent a little hot air, not pass judgement.

And for crying out loud, people.... I'm not some font of perfect knowledge about things at Mythic or in the industry. Most of the time I won't even *talk* about Mythic, because anything I say gets jumped on and made some kind of official "Mythic says" proclamation. I am by nature a theorist, I like to conceive perfect systems that meet up with mathematical and philosophical ideals. Of course, ivory tower bullshit walks, hard code and working systems do the real talking. So to me, everything we do in these games looks rushed and incomplete. But don't read too much into it, I'm a navel-gazer, not a prophet, if everything was done my way *nothing* would ever get done at all. If I say something in these games is a "short term" approach, it's because to me long term is 20+ years out. Short term is like the next 5 to 10 years. A smart company isn't going to walk away from a successful game just because it makes another game. In our case, we're adding so many people to the Camelot team that everyone should agree that we're being smart ;-).

Picking up where I left off, it strikes me that most of that 10% that never creates an account has to be either gifts, or people that didn't realize you needed an internet connection or credit card to play the game until they got it home. Most of the 10% that create an account but never log in, it seems like it must be inadequate equipment to run the client at an acceptable performance level. I just can't think of any other reason why someone would get all the way through creating an account and never play.

Yeah, it doesn't ring true to me either. Something else is going on there.

Anyway, moving on. One way or another, it seems obvious that most of the people who join these games do it by word of mouth. It seems like we're missing a lot of bets on how to put that to work for us. There have been occasional attempts to give the person coming in a break on price based on a referral, but what if we take the next step? Say, if you refer someone into the game, not only do they get 10% off their first billing cycle (anywhere from a buck and change to $10 for the yearly plans some games have), but every month they are an active paying account, the referrer gets $1 off *their* next billing cycle. It would be insanely easy to set up the programming behind this, and what's the worst that could happen? Some guy who recruits and keeps 11 or more people in the game has a free account? Oh, gee, make over $100 a month where you were making $11-12, that sucks. And maybe those 11 get 11 each and you make over a grand. Compared to the costs of acquiring customers through traditional advertising, it's a great deal. You get the kid whose parents cut off the credit charge recruiting his friends at school, the pizza delivery guy talking up the people he delivers to. Most of our customers already come from our customers, why not act like we know it?

There's a concept in martial arts (probably borrowed from Zen Buddhism) that translates as "Beginner's Mind". It parallels the western concept of "Out of the mouths of babes", crossed with the Will Rogers quote about what you think you know that "ain't neccessarily so". People with experience get blinders, they "know" the answer to certain questions, so they quit asking them. To approach something with a beginner's mind is to check your assumptions at the door and look at a problem as if seeing it for the first time.

With that in mind, I wanted to take a look at something very basic: Where do our customers come from, why do they stay, why do they leave?

Where did all these people come from? No matter how you slice it, well over half a million people in the US and Europe play MMOG's (maybe as many as a million). How did they find them, why did they keep playing? Many don't, close 1/2 of all the people who buy the box never get as far as paying for a single month. Somewhere around 10% buy the box and never create an account, another 10% make an account but never log in. WTF? 1 customer in 5 lost without ever seeing the inside of the game? How the hell does that happen? Another 10% log in once or twice, then never again, almost a third of our customers lost before they *really* start playing. And then things turn around, almost everyone who makes it past the first session or two winds up staying long-term. Why? And why does the current retention rate in Camelot show a linear relationship with the level of the main character? These are bizarre numbers. Nothing I would have expected, given what I already know. Or at least, think I know.

Okay, back to the "Beginner's Mind". How does someone come to the game?

1) Hear about it from a friend/co-worker, or saw them playing.

2) Playing another game, and learn about it from discussion either in that game or in message boards about that game.

3) See advertising about it, and find it interesting enough to look into it further, like what they see and purchase the game.

4) Buy it on impulse based on seeing it in the store.

If there are any other ways for someone to come in, I can't think of it off hand. So of these, which are the most important? I can't think of anyone who has ever told me that their first exposure to MMOG's was an advertisement, or just picking it up in the store. Virtually all of them heard about it from a friend in one way or another.

So I'm working on the presentation for the MUD-Dev summit. 30 minutes is a really inconvenient time slot to fill, it's both too long and too short. Too short for a really complete discussion, too long to stand there looking stupid.

So I am trying to figure out how to make it short and snappy. The topic is "Coping with Omniscience: Managing Player Feedback in MMOG's." Yeah, pretentious as hell. What can I say, I have a reputation for arrogance to uphold. Anyway, my first thought was to approach it as a problem in systems theory, complex systems want to close their feedback loops, yada yada. Yeah, I can hear the snores already. So, short and snappy.

Well, I can start with simply laying out the numbers. 150,000 players putting in 20 hours a week each, 312,000,000 hours spent playing the game each year. Over half a million posts to the VN Dev Round Table in the last year. 500 to 5000 bug reports a day. It's an insane amount of information to process. The first reaction of every MMOG prior to Camelot was to recoil in shock, retreat into the bunker and hope they would go away. The results were not pretty, Scott Jennings got his visibility in the industry by pointing out the stupid mistakes that reaction caused. The classic example is EQ Alchemy, for more than a year it was broken, for more than a year every player knew it was impossible to advance in the skill because a key recipe could not be successfully completed, for more than a year Verant was convinced that the reports they were getting of it being broken were bogus.

How could that happen? It turned out that there were two items in the game with identical names. One of them could be used for the recipe, one could not. The one that could not was the only one that actually available to the players. When Verant's internal QA tested it, they looked up the item numbers listed in the recipe, created it, and counted it as a false report and closed it. This happened repeatedly for a year. That says what happened, but not why.

99 out of 100 bug reports are bogus. Either duplicate, or not enough information, or just plain wrong. If you're handling bug reports for an MMOG, regardless of your methods for gathering the reports you have to learn to triage them ruthlessly. Not enough detail, trash it. Seen it ten times before, dump it. Tested it yesterday, gone. It takes 15 minutes to 4 hours to properly test a single bug, and even with the most ruthless triage methods the overwhelming majority will turn out to be bogus. To properly test every report would take dozens of people, resources that simply will never be available. It wouldn't do any good if there were, only so many bugs can get fixed and confirming bugs faster than they get fixed is fairly pointless.

One common source of bogus bug reports is the bad run of luck. With so many players, extremely unlikely runs of luck are not only possible but inevitable. If you flip a coin ten times and it comes up heads every time, you're probably going to check the coin to make sure it has a tails side, the odds were 1024 to 1 against. But if 10,000 people flip a coin 10 times in a row, the odds that you won't see at least one turn up all heads is even less. Humans are extremely good at finding patterns, even when they aren't really there. Someone has a bad run and assumes that they have found a bug. It happens hundreds of times a day, even more on Patch days. So you get into a pattern of blowing off reports that look like just a bad run of luck.

In EQ trades, there is always a chance of failure, never less than 15%. So reports of bad runs are going to be a constant, and the reports on this bug would be indistiguishable from a bad run. However, shouldn't the fact that Alchemy would have been bringing in more reports than any other trade (since *everyone* who tried to skill up in Alchemy ran into this wall) have raised a red flag (leaving aside the question of why the system made no distinction in feedback to the player between failures from lack of skill, failed skill checks, and wrong ingredients, and this was probably a bad idea)? As near as I can tell, it did. Verant internal QA checked it out several times, and each time they found that it worked. Keep in mind, to this point, Verant had done everything right, but we still have the outcome that a game-stopping (for would-be Master Alchemists) bug in the game, and it stayed in the game for well over a year. Where did they go wrong?

The answer to that comes from how the bug finally got properly indentified and verified. Scott Jennings, formerly known as Lum the Mad and operator of a well-known rant site at the time, happened to make a visit to Verant San Diego, and he happened to bring his wife along, and she happened to be a hard core crafter. At one point, she sits the producer and the QA lead down and demonstrates to them that it is impossible to succeed at this recipe. And that was that, the bug was demonstrated, the cause was found, and a fix was implemented, the whole sad sorry tale of broken Alchemy boiled down to a failure to communicate.

In Camelot, we never had that particular problem, because of the Team Lead program. The TL program has its problems and certainly isn't perfect, but one thing it has done very well is ensure that bugs that slipped through the cracks of the standard process get explored and re-raised until the neccessary information needed to verify the bug gets through to the people that need to fix it. The TL's interact with Mythic people on a board available only to them, they also trade email with developers directly. Because the number of TL's is limited, we aren't overwhelmed by their feedback, and we can judge and deal with them as individuals. We know that this guy does very good controlled tests, so when he submits a log analysis we don't have to waste much time confirming his work and can move straight to diagnosing what could give the results. We know that this one has a bit of a fixation on a particular spell, that that one doesn't like the other one and will disagree with whatever he said just because he said it, and so on. The TL's are not the great faceless mass of players that *must* be mostly ignored if we're to make any progress, they are people with whom we have a history and a relationship. It seems to work pretty well.

That ain't short or snappy, is it? Oh well, I'll keep working on it.

If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?

Doing it over usually isn't an option in these games. Even when a system is messed up and far from ideal, it has to be outright broken before rebuilding it is a real option. And even then, many players will protest. You would think this would mean that we would try and carefully think through our systems, make sure we were doing it right. But the fact is, everything always takes longer than we can really afford, and adding more time to that rarely seems acceptable.

Of course, a lot of why everything takes longer is because we never make anything any better or more flexible than it has to be. Short term fixes on top of band-aids on top of hurry-up jobs on top of prototypes grown beyond all recognition. But we didn't have time to do it right, and we'll certainly never get the chance to do it over.

How can you spend 10 to 25 million dollars to make a game, and miss? How can you do it four times in a row? Christ on a crutch, UO, EQ, AC, and DAoC were all made for less than $5 million. How can you spend 5 times that and shoot yourself in the foot so thoroughly?

I once commented in mud-dev that if DAoC hadn't been made in 2 years by a team of 20-30, it would have taken a team of 100+ and at least another year. Now it looks like you can't even brute force it. MMOG's have to be built to a common plan and "vision", some one person needs to know what the game is going to be and be able to keep all the balls in the air.

J C Lawrence's "stating the obvious" law
The more people you get, the more versions of "what we're really doing" you're going to get.

These games are out on the edge of what the games industry is capable of. Huge featuresets, complex environments, and yet they cannot be designed by committee vote. Given enough time, our theories will be strong enough and well enough accepted that they won't be so dependant on the capabilities of individuals to coordinate large teams.

I've mentioned in past discussions that I think these games are going to eventually evolve into the virtual environments that are so popular in SciFi. Holodeck quality environments, where the system redefines itself according to the whims of the user. The obvious barrier in the way is the interface technology, we do not have the hologram emitters or neural bypasses to present a manufactured reality to the user.

But beyond that, we have a long way to go in learning how to create the environments themselves. Looking at where we are trying to get, I think I can put forth three principles for the *near* (in the next 5 to 10 years) future of these games:

1) AI will get more purposeful. Not neccessarily smarter, not at a tactical level anyway, the function of AI in these games is to *lose*, to be a foil for the players. But the NPC's and monsters will display more purpose, at an organizational level they will have goals they are trying to achieve, something to do besides just waiting around for players to come and kill them.

2) Environments will get more detailed. Not just higher polygon counts and denser textures, but finer-grained and more responsive. Terrain will deform, ground textures will change in response to traffic patterns, buildings will not only have operating doors but windows that open and close, rather than being monolithic blocks they will become modular assemblages of rooms, then will be built up from primitives representing walls, floors, and other pieces (Atriarch is already there, but I think that for all the power of their system, it is probably premature). Not only will you be able to swim in the rivers, but you'll be able to dig a ditch from them and fill a moat.

3) Players will gain more control over the world. They'll manipulate the more purposeful AI for their own purposes, driving and herding NPC's to maximize their hunting return, they'll dig the ditches and moats and pile up the earth from it to make a platform for their castles. Although the lowest level of core gameplay will always be grinding up mobs and turning them into cash and loot, additional layers (PvP, land management, politics, civil engineering, politics, etc.) will be layered over the top.

All of these will serve one over-riding imperative: The hand of the designer will get more and more removed from the sight of the players. Right now the players have to "pretend not to see" an awful lot, NPC's appear from thin air, monsters wait around to be killed, buildings are cardboard simulations, NPC's sell and buy things that make no sense. It is my opinion that it is these rough edges and developer fiats that are the major barrier between these games and the mass market, and not any issue of "casual" gamers not being willing to accept fantasy or sci-fi themes, or disliking levelling treadmills. Rather, those that like fantasy for itself will accept the rough edges and "don't look behind the curtain" mechanics of these games for the sake of what it has that they do like. If you want, *prefer*, a world of swords and dragons, then averting your eyes from the fact that your swords and dragons are conjured from thin air, with not the slightest excuse or apology, is not difficult. But if you're not such an imaginative type, being expected to ignore such things is just too much to ask.

In the perfect MMOG, it will be impossible to find the seams. In the *improved* MMOG, you'll have to deliberately look for them.

There are certain images that are burned into my mind, if the day came where a moment's reflection could not bring them back to me, I would question my own mental competence. On that list is the first puppy I received as a present, the place and face related to my loss of virginity, the view of a khaki Crown Victoria framed by my passenger window...and a globular puff of smoke against a clear blue sky, with two streamers curling up and away from it like a pair of horns. Now we've lost another shuttle.

The first time, we recoiled with shock, didn't fly into space again for a long time. Now I wonder if we'll turn our backs on space for good. It's a dangerous business, probably always will be, and I don't know if we have the stomach for it.

I think I've finally found a better metaphor for describing some attributes of MMOG's: Amusement Parks. An amusement park has a fairly high up-front cost, and works by a rather bizzarre set of rules: It competes with itself. By that, I mean that everything inside the park competes for the attention of the park visitors. If you build a new roller-coaster, it will reduce the popularity of other coasters, and so on. But if you fail to continually renew and replace and refurbish and refine your attractions, even though it may take a long time you *are* dooming your park to eventual obsolescence and closure.

Haemish at Waterthread is correct when he points out that MMOG operators are failing to take this into account, that they are trapped in the mentality of the disposable entertainment product that has 3 months to earn out or else. Yes, UO's subscriber base is declining, they are trapped by the limits of their technology. EQ's may be, they are trapped by their own design choices, any chance they had to break free passed them by somewhere around Shadows of Luclin.

Camelot, I won't discuss, let's just say that I am not in agreement with my superiors on this point. The belief that a game cannot last more than a few years leads to decisions likely to make it true.

Ought to be asleep right now, but I needed to finish a point I made a couple of days ago: If I'm correct that the social complexity of EQ and DAoC compared to other games is a direct result of the class interdependancies developed in Diku muds and refined considerably in those two games, then non-fantasy games have a serious problem (as evidenced by the less than stellar performance of everything else except, possibly, TSO). There are a minimum of 12 classes per realm in DAoC, and I'm proud to say that at least now, none of them suck, all of them have a significant role that they fill better than anyone else in their realm. More than that, there are multiple viable spec paths for almost all classes, and many of those play very differently. This is a considerable amount of complexity to try and match, and some game types will *not* lend themselves to TNH gameplay. Hell, some game types preclude combat.

I'm certain that without interdependancy through differentiation, you won't see significant social development, and I'm pretty sure that without a signicant social environment, an MMOG is doomed from conception.

Phooey, stupid thing to be awake at 1 am over.

While I write this, the President is giving the State of the Union address. I'm not watching it, I can't convince myself it's important. Somehow the possibility, even probability of a war seems impossible to relate to. Are we going to fight over terrorism? Our so-called allies in the middle east have done far more to support terrorism than Iraq has. Over weapons of mass destruction? He's had them, *used* them, for decades. Over nukes? Korea has them, Pakistan has them, India has them.

Is it about Chaney and Colin Powell finishing what they started? George junior proving he can succeed where his father fell short? Or just Texas oil men trying to put the oil import problem to bed once and for all? If the war really is neccessary, how can we be sure? God, I'm glad I'm not in the service any more, I'd hate to be facing this war at close range, maybe getting killed over something that might be nothing but petty posturing and greed. At least Vietnam *started* over a principle. I just hope my nephew is going to be okay, last I heard he was in the 101st Airborne, probably somewhere just north of Afghanistan.

com·mu·ni·ty   

n. pl. com·mu·ni·ties



   1.

         a. A group of people living in the same locality and under the same government.

         b. The district or locality in which such a group lives.

   2.

         a. A group of people having common interests: the scientific community; the international business community.

         b. A group viewed as forming a distinct segment of society: the gay community; the community of color.

   3.

         a. Similarity or identity: a community of interests.

         b. Sharing, participation, and fellowship.

   4. Society as a whole; the public.

In this case, the dictionary is wrong. Community is not a noun, it's a verb. It is a "thing" only in the sense that a cloud or a flame is a thing, it is not concrete and discrete, but a dynamic process in equilibrium. What is seen is only the emergent manifestation of something that may be very different.

In these games, the community is frequently not as it may appear. The *visible* manifestation of the community is found in web sites, but only a tiny fraction of these will attract the notice of a developer (and that will not always be positive). Generally unseen are the guild message boards, where most of the web-based communication occurs. And even those boards are only the tip of the iceberg.

The core of the community process is usually too close to see: Group play behaviour. If the game reserves the best reward ratios for multiple players working together (explicitly or not), then real community dynamics can form. But it is not enough that they simply play together, the game needs to encourage them to cooperate with the *same* people repeatedly.

That requires some explanation. Social bonds grow stronger the more often they are used. If any random player is an adequate source of group-play rewards, there is no incentive to seek out the same people and reinforce those bonds. You get the behaviour you reward, if you reward nothing, you get nothing.

Over the course of many years, the Tank/Nuker/Healer triad and Aggro-management based combat of Diku-style MUD's was refined into an extremely powerful engine for creating social bonds and turning crowds of strangers into collections of guilds filled with friends. In TNH gameplay, you don't want just any random stranger, you want the complement to the character you are playing. And once you have a pair, you want to fill the third side of the triad.

So you form a triad one day, and the next day you and one member of the triad are both online. You collect each other because that puts both of you halfway to a full triad. When you gather a third, you have added to your pool of potential partners for the next session, and strengthened your bond with the other member of the original triad.

This by itself won't form very deep bonds or very large social formations. Aggro-management gameplay adds the needed selection pressure, you don't want just any tank, nuker, or healer, you want one who knows how to do his part in managing aggro, and that you have confidence in. Now the community process is stable. This dynamic, allowed to play itself out, will form about the same level of social formation as has long been seen in MUD's and small-scale OLRPG's, guilds in the size range of a dozen or two.

In EQ and DAoC, further dependencies are introduced. You not only need Tank/Nuker/Healer, but Buffers, Crowd Controllers, "Speed" classes, and others. Players have to carefully think through the consequences of various options, and more roles have to be performed to maximize the XP return of the group. These were not planned to serve this purpose, but were the result of trying to find sufficient unique spells to fill out the spell lists of so many casters, or simply suggested by the different nature of a 3D game. In a text MUD, many things that are obvious in a 3D environment are simply impossible to express, and in a 2D environment they will be vague and unclear. This increased complexity of interdependance led to average guild sizes in the 30-50 member range in EQ.

In EQ and to a lesser extent DAoC, beyond this immediate tactical level of cooperation, group effort is required to acquire the items that each member needs to be fully effective. NPC's that require large numbers of players working to a common plan must be taken down, the loot equitably divided, and plans put forward for the next course of action. This does not seem to increase the size of guilds significantly, but it does cause them to get much more organized and militant. In EQ, strict controls on the spawn rates of these NPC's led to the highest level of organization found in that game, the "Calendar" system for sharing the spawn between the guilds capable of killing the NPC's in question. So-called "Planes Capable" guilds were frequently not particularly friendly places, many members express disatisfaction with the environment. However, if they left the guild, they would lose access to the first-tier equipment they desired.

As I mentioned, DAoC does not have nearly the same degree of item-acquisition-centric organization. Although "Epic" mobs exist that require large numbers of players to defeat, the primary limitation is coordinating the forces needed, and generally not the spawn rate of the NPC, and this lack of time pressure seems to relieve the social tensions. There is an exception as I write this, "Respec Stones" were added to the dragons recently, the pent-up demand for this capability has led to dragons being killed as quickly as they can respawn. Only time can tell if this will continue.

At any rate, this does not seem to have had a negative impact on social formation. The accuracy with which DAoC guilds can be measured actually makes it harder to judge them in comparison to EQ, large numbers of moribund and inactive guilds with few or no active members draw down the averages, where they would be invisible in EQ or AC they are clearly see on the Herald. At any rate, guilds of 100+ active members are common, and 200+ are not rare.

Beyond this, DAoC recognizes a higher level of organization, the Alliance. Alliances are formal organizations of guilds, up to 20 of them. There being no formal equivalent in other games, it is difficult to make comparisons. However, the only recognizable structures of an equivalent scale are a few of the AC "monarchies". However, AC's monarchies lacked one crtical component to qualify as social organizations: Pursuit of a collective goal (unless the goal was ensuring that someone qualified as "king").

Alliances are divided in type between those with a PvE focus and those with an RvR focus. The question generally seems to be determined by how it is decided to use the Alliance chat channel. If the channel is used primarily as a place to look for PvE groups, then the alliance winds up with a PvE focus (or had one all along, and the use of the channel only revealed it), if it is used for coordinating RvR activities then the alliance has a RvR focus. Generally, the largest alliances are RvR focused, and the size of alliances in a realm seems to have significant impact on the performance of the realm as a whole in RvR.

The goals of these alliances are control of Darkness Falls, and defense or acquisition of relics. At the individual level, the goals are acquiring Realm points that can be used towards gaining Realm Abilities, enhancements to the character above and beyond those normally gained, and gaining access to the loot in DF.

This seems to be important, the goals of the organization cannot be meaningfully separated from those of the individuals that form them. Although the organization may appear to pursue goals beyond those of the individuals, at some level they must serve the individual or they wouldn't continue to participate in their pursuit. What it is may not be clear, and what it appears to be may not be the actual core of the motivation.

It strikes me that we are entering a hiatus, a dark age of sorts, in the history of MMOG's. Since 1997, we've had 5 clear successes, 4 clear failures, a handful of marginal successes, and a bunch of games that most people never even heard of. Just in the last year more than a hundred million dollars has been put into developing these games, and about that much revenue has been booked by the top 5 US games. Meanwhile, Lineage remains the state religion of South Korea.

Three games with 8 figure budgets came out in 2002, and only one of them has any real chance of making back the investment. Two more 8-figure projects are currently in progress, each of which has the central concept of doing away with all that messy game stuff, and centering itself on being strictly a virtual social space that happens to contain gamelike-activities. They're doomed, in my opinion. That's not counting two more with equally large budgets and based on major licenses that will probably do all right, but not up to the expectations the budgets are predicated on.

There's this assumption that the currently successful games were so badly and amateurishly executed that they couldn't possibly have done more than scratch the surface of the market. Their shortcomings seem obvious, they have long and boring level treadmills, they mostly had severe technical problems at launch, and mostly went through hard and unpleasant balancing phases, with intense PR issues. Certainly real pros can do b