Last Tuesday, I presented at the 2008 Game Developers Conference in the mobile track about the best ways of connecting mobile games and MMOs. Here are my slides (PowerPoint file). Gamasutra wrote a surprisingly thorough summary. The session was well-attended; among the audience were several large MMO developers who have yet to announce their mobile plans. It will be interesting to see which directions they go with mobile.
Dan Roy: Thanks for taking the time to answer some questions, Cardell. Let's jump right in. When working on Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), did you think at all about mobile (e.g. checking auctions via WAP or SMS)?
Cardell Kerr: Absolutely! The simple fact is that these games prosper off of continued investment from the player, and there are few mechanics that foster this better than allowing a person to ping an auction house, or allow for some form of online trade. Ultimately, we decided to focus on the heart of the game more so (questing and combat), knowing we could add more support for other options later.
Dan Roy: Thanks for participating in this conversation, Raph. Let's talk MMOs. Throughout your career with MMOs, did you think at all about mobile (e.g. checking auctions via WAP or SMS)? What possibilities with mobile excite you, if any?
Raph Koster: Every project I've ever been on except for the very earliest ones, there was the question of what, if anything, we could expose via mobile. Ideas like letting people check friends online, check status of auctions, do crafting, and so on, were always common proposals.
Personally, I suspect that mobile is going to rapidly grow into being more than just a minor adjunct in the sense that those proposals imply. I think there will be full-blown mobile clients to virtual worlds.
This Saturday I presented at MIT's Media in Transition 5 conference. The presentation covered identity construction, something I've been focusing on in my thesis. Gene Koo, Fellow at Harvard Law, summarized the presentation on his blog. Here's my own shorter summary for the conference program. I also moderated a panel:
Reimagining Identity
Anne Petersen, Perez Hilton and the New Star Production
Thomas Riccio, Trickster Reality
Agnieszka Wenninger, Deleuzian Perspectives on Ownership and Identity on the Web
Moderator: Dan Roy
Kyu C. Lee from Gamevil wasn't able to make it to his scheduled session on the mobile MMO Path of a Warrior (I interviewed Allen Lee last year about this same game). This was due to a scheduling miscommunication between Kyu and GDC, as Kyu had left earlier in the day (I later learned) for his own wedding. Since everyone in the room was interested in mobile MMOs, I couldn't let them just leave without meeting any of them and hearing their perspectives. So, with the blessing of the Conference Associates and the sound technicians in the room, I turned to the session into an impromptu roundtable. It ended up going very well. Read the summary on Gamasutra by Eric-Jon Waugh.
Here's a link to a talk I gave last Monday at the Serious Games Summit at GDC on the learning game I'm designing at MIT with Maryland Public Television and Fablevision. The talk was very well received by a packed room. We started the talk by describing the story, presentation, and gameplay, and ended it by letting the audience play a prototype level from the game as a group.
Clark, Andy. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence. NY: Oxford University Press, 2003.
While reading Natural-Born Cyborgs, by Andy Clark, I found his understanding of presence helpful for thinking about what might make players in virtual worlds feel immersed and present. This is an especially tricky question when accounting for the differences of logging into the world from a PC and a cell phone. Clark's conclusion is in part that interactivity enables presence. Luckily, games have plenty of that.
I also enjoyed Clark's description of the self as inclusive of tools and abilities that can change depending upon circumstance and environment. Just as an amputee has a self without a limb, so too can a prosthetic (or even virtual identity) be considered part of the self (more detail below). The self is maleable, which is good news for gamers looking to take on new selves.
Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Cambridge: Basic Books, 2002.
While reading Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold I couldn't help but notice the similarities between the wireless, connected world he envisions and the worlds game developers have been creating with MMOs for some time. Most of my observations from reading therefore apply to MMOs, ironically, more than mobile.
Rheingold writes of hypothetical futures where mobile phone wielders interact in new ways. The technology to enable these interactions has, in many cases, not yet arrived. However, many of the scenarios he discusses could be simulated in MMOs. In my own life, for instance, I experienced location-aware collaboration with friends and strangers first through MMOs. That collaboration is just entering my real world now through cell phones. Similarly, I receive status information about group members in MMOs, like what kind of assistance they need or can provide and how quickly. In virtual combat, I can tell who needs healing. Even just on AIM with buddy lists and away messages I can quickly tell who needs consoling or needs someone with whom to share good news. This kind of information will become more common and more integrated into everyday life through cell phones. Before this future arrives more fully, we can experiment with what it might be liked by implementing variations in MMOs. We can also look to location-aware, status-based collaboration mediated by cell phones for inspiration about interactions we could take back into MMOs. Rheingold's vision of the future of smart mobs certainly stimulated my imagination for MMO design.
While reading The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, by Malcolm Gladwell, I saw several applications to the kind of persistent, mobile games I'm talking about designing.
If you paid careful attention to the structure and format of your material, you could dramatically enhance stickiness. (110)
Game designers over the years have designed a high percentage of their games as experiences players take in for hours at a time until the game is done. At that point, players leave the game looking for another. The rise of MMOs over the last several years has emphasized another play style: play for hours at a time, but never finish. However, there is a growing fear among players that these sorts of games take too much time. These players are unlikely to even begin playing an MMO. However, MMOs lead the game industry in accommodating varied play styles, so it makes sense that they attempt to provide a compelling experience for players who can't afford much time. I'm avoiding the word casual to describe these players, since it's a nebulous term that evokes many different assumptions.
Webcasts for the Futures of Entertainment Conference are now online. This was a great conference at MIT a few weeks ago. Take a look at the sessions on User-Generated Content, Transmedia Properties, and Virtual Worlds ("Not the Real World Anymore").
