Cross Gamer - Cross-Platform

GDC: Connecting Mobile Games and MMOs

Dan Roy — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:44:31 -0700

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.

Thesis interview with Cardell Kerr

Dan Roy — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 11:46:10 -0600

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: Like you said, mobile is great for keeping people connected to the game world and thinking about it, like pinging an auction house. However, it's also potentially powerful for another kind of interaction. As social as MMOs are, people generally have to be in their respective homes at their desktop computers to socialize in the game online. Mobile could allow people to socialize face-to-face and in the game online at the same time. Have you thought about any features like that? A one-on-one duel of some kind via mobile could be fun if players aren't near each other and even more fun if they are.

Cardell Kerr: We've certainly thought about it, though in all fairness the design of most current Big Budget MMPs [MMP is another term for MMO] doesn't support it all that well, since most of our gameplay drives play cycles of 40-90 minutes. I think LOTRO is more likely to branch into the web mini-game space before it fully embraces/utilizes mobile phones.

Dan Roy: Given that "these games prosper off of continued investment from the player," why have you targeted most of your gameplay toward cycles of 40-90 minutes? I know that's pretty standard with today's MMOs, but play sessions of that length can't easily occur continually throughout the day. If you wanted to attract players who wanted shorter but more frequent interaction, how would you design it? Would you put those players in the same world as the ones playing for 40-90 minutes at a time, or would you make these two separate games?

Cardell Kerr: Heh, a very good question. Mostly it's because the MMO of today's world is anything but casual/easy to get into, in addition to the fact that the target audience supports that model (currently). As I've gotten older, I've realized (sometimes painfully) that play times of that long are quite simple impossible to maintain for a person with a very busy work schedule... This is probably one of the reasons why more recent MMO's have been a great deal more solo friendly, though their timelines still skew into the "play for an hour, or don't bother" category. As for how I'd aim for the casual audience, I would make a separate game. The simple fact is that you want to make a game EASY for a casual audience to sample, play, and meet up with their friends. Most MMO's, while getting better, aren't quite at the IRC level yet, and IRC is pretty daunting to the casual player. Making something easy is ironically, quite hard. ;)

Dan Roy: Now that we've discussed mobile a bit, let's talk about the browser. I know LOTRO has some innovative features that allow players to access data or aspects of the game from a web browser. What was the discussion around how to use the web browser to extend the game? Is there more you would like to do with the browser?

Cardell Kerr: Ahh, well currently we're pushing on the concept of the Lorebook, a construct in LOTRO that allows you to view object/monster lists, quest lists, and NPC lists. In the future, we'd like to push this even further, by adding a Google map analog, and personal character stats. Ultimately, we wanted to ensure that we were providing all the key information we could as to how to play our game. As it stands, these games are large, intimidating amounts of information, and breaking them down into easy to parse chunks is a wise thing, from both a product standpoint, and from a consumer one.

Dan Roy: People probably only have the 3D game client installed on one computer at home, but they can access a web browser from many different places. Have you thought about designing any kinds of interactions with the game that could also or only happen through a web browser? Even checking auctions, as you've considered enabling on mobile, could be fun from a browser. Browser activities could allow people to play or check in on the game in some limited capacity from laptops, computer labs, or workplace PCs that don't have fast graphics cards.

Cardell Kerr: Heh, See above! Anyhow, I actually want to push the web game element of LOTRO as we move forward, especially since I can see it integrating with the elements of account advancement we already have. Sure, there are some very good standard elements (such as checking auctions, mail, character stats, online status), but I would be very excited to allow for mini games that allow Destiny point accrual, or other achievements that fuel your account in some way.

Dan Roy: Speaking of achievements, what do you think motivates players most to invest in improving a character in LOTRO, whether it be leveling, getting better gear, joining a better guild, or anything else? Do you think seeing oneself become more masterful is a major part of that? How much of a priority was it for the LOTRO team to make sure players could clearly see their own increasing mastery (both in their avatar's abilities and their own skills)? How much of a priority was it to make this increasing mastery more socially visible - to group members, guildmates, the whole server, and the whole game population across servers?

Cardell Kerr: Hrm, that's a difficult question. Well, when it comes to games, I think the reason why people invest time is initially recreational fun, and if that actually sticks, they normally begin to pursue mastery of the game (in the case of RPGs this is often to see a story unfold, or for tournament games, its to destroy the competition, and lastly, for toy type games, it's to complete whatever aspirations they have for the construct their assembling, whether it be a city, or a sim lifestyle). In terms of social cliques, it's all about showing people your stuff. MMPs tend to combine these two elements, making it impossible to separate "showing off stuff" from mastery of the game. If anything, I'd go so far as to say that "throwing the ring in the volcano doesn't mean as much, if you don't have proof." This is one of the main reasons we pursued so many avenues of advancement. Most games just have equipment, whereas we have equipment, traits, titles, emotes, and even skills. All of those are important, because they allow players to show off cool new things as a part of their own identity.

Dan Roy: That's great that you have so many different avenues for advancement. The people you come across in the game may be impressed with your advancements, however there are lots of people you might not come across. What if I wanted to build a balanced guild from the pool of everyone on the server so we have people who, combined, have advanced along all the different avenues? Have you thought about making those kinds of skills and advancements more visible to the whole server?

Cardell Kerr: This is one of the elements of the Lorebook we're already planning: the ability for character stats to be exported and reported on in a web browser, thus allowing them to publish their achievements. From there, we can rank characters based on those achievements, enabling everyone to see who hit level 50 first, or most recently, who completed all the deeds in the game, etc... In addition, we also allow people to opt out of the reporting, as we do respect privacy. ;)

Dan Roy: One last question. How do you see the MMO genre evolving and how would you like it to evolve?

Cardell Kerr: Well, currently, I think we're seeing some patterns emerge that look achingly familiar among the "hardcore" gamer. Back in the late 90's, they entered the RTS Market with a humongous bang, and boosted development costs so high (in order to compete), that people made some very expensive decisions that just didn't pan out. Additionally, everyone wanted to get into the RTS market because everyone wanted to be the next 'Warcraft". The MMO space is in a very similar location right now, as Blizzard has a tendency to set the pace for PC games. As a result, I think the near term MMO space is going to get crowded with some very expensive (and possibly unsuccessful) titles in the future. We all know that standing toe to toe with Blizzard is... well, hard.

As for where I would like the MMO space to go? That's a very interesting question. I'm actually of the opinion that finding a solid element on the console is probably where it's at. At the end of the road, the console already has mass appeal, and they have proven that they can roll other entertainment functions into them (PS2 with a DVD player, Xbox/PS3 with their Bluray/HDDvD elements). Once that's proven, I think we will start to see a large amount of games coming into resolution, each one in a viable, social environment. Anything we can do to push the social space to allow for more than just "men in tights" is a good thing, but I am especially interested in achieving that without have to make boutique budgets, as the current space is either 30 million or 2.

Dan Roy: Thanks for the interview, Cardell.

Thesis interview with Raph Koster

Dan Roy — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 11:25:26 -0600

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.

Dan Roy: I agree completely that mobile will become more than just a minor adjunct and we will see full-blown mobile clients to virtual worlds. How do you think players on mobile clients will interact with players on more robust clients like desktops, laptops, and consoles? Will cross-platform interactions emphasize asymmetric roles and reduced time pressure to even the playing field across different interfaces?

Raph Koster: There's really as many answers to that as there are possible platforms… obviously, mobile platforms tend to be much more limited not only in their rendering capabilities but also in their interfaces and their network capabilities. Until there's greater parity, I think it is safe to say that the roles played online by users on different clients will have to be different.

Dan Roy: How much of a priority have features been that allow players to access data from or aspects of the game from a web browser? Do you see the browser as an opportunity to let players interact with MMOs from any computer? What opportunities does that create?

Raph Koster: Oddly, web integration with server backends is something that has come slowly and grudgingly. It took a long time for stuff like UO's guild metrics, DAoC's player metrics, and so on to show up. Now of course, the SOE "Players" offerings and the WoW metrics site have opened up quite a lot. I suspect that some of the reluctance has come from the tradition of embedding everything into the server. In the old mud servers, discussions forums were in-game, mail was in-game, and so on. What metrics existed were also exposed in-game, rather than via the web.

Similarly, I think that the pattern of requiring dedicated clients has precluded a lot of the thinking around web clients. I've written before about how by nature, virtual worlds want to be streaming – that's effectively what a text-based protocol IS, and that's how these worlds got their start. A true streaming protocol that was client-agnostic would open up the door for web-based clients, as well as much more – alternate clients, vertical applications for clients, and so on.

Dan Roy: What will it take to really open the door for all of these different ways of accessing a streaming world? Are we more likely to see many different access methods being developed by the studios that first create the virtual worlds, by other studios or individuals if the stream is opened up?

Raph Koster: Well, the core thing needed is really some standards on protocols. Right now, so much of the thinking around virtual worlds by the big developers is around walled gardens that typically, they don't even share network protocols within one publisher. Having common standards will be a pretty dramatic shift, but it is one I am sure is coming.

Dan Roy: How does the player experience change to be able to access the stream in many convenient ways? This would let players stay immersed in the virtual world more of the time and further blur the boundaries between game and life, right?

Raph Koster: Yes, it would. But more importantly, it would open the virtual world to lots of other kinds of interactions. Picture virtual worlds that can spit out game data as web services – or that you can access functionality from a browser. A network stream that could be directed to multiple clients at once that have very different display methods, like a tactical view versus a first-person view – the military is always asking for this capability.

Ironically, virtual world developers have done this a lot – they all have tool clients, and network testing clients, and the like, that monitor the health of the world using radically different displays.

Dan Roy: What do you think motivates players most to invest in improving a character in MMOs, whether it be leveling, getting better gear, joining a better guild, or any other way. Do you think seeing oneself become more masterful is a major part of that? How much of a priority has it been on your various projects to make sure players could clearly see their own increasing mastery (both in their avatar's abilities and their own skills)? How much of a priority was it to make this increasing mastery more socially visible - to group members, guildmates, the whole server, and the whole game population across servers?

Raph Koster: A sense of progress is critical to keeping players engaged in any game. Designers pay a lot of attention to providing that feedback. The sense of mastery can actually be conveyed in many different ways – levels and gear are far from the only ones. In more social settings, mastery can be measured by size of the friends list, for example, or by number of greetings when logging in, or by social influence.

It's always been important to present something of this sort to players in order to set social context. It's incredibly important that other players be able to see your level of achievement and respond appropriately. Doing it across servers is less important than doing it within the frame of reference of a given player, though – it's more important to get the social feedback from the people you interact with, than it is to have a game-wide leaderboard. Very few people reach the top on a large leaderboard, and it can have the opposite effect from what is intended, forcing the player to realize that their mastery is in fact nothing special.

Dan Roy: Can you give some examples of design choices you made, in spite of other drawbacks, that favor enabling increasing mastery or making it more visible to players and social networks? Can you give examples of the reverse, where you sacrificed increasing mastery or visibility for something else?

Raph Koster: Hmm. Certainly, in the general sense showing relative mastery is a good thing, but not always. So leaderboards is the classic example. Sometimes you create inadvertent leaderboards – for example, in UO we had bounties for playerkillers. The bounties were posted in town so that you could see who to hunt. But we sorted based on the amount, which made it into a high-score table of sorts – who could get the largest bounty? The result was that playerkillers went and worked to climb that achievement ladder. We ended up hiding it because it promoted the opposite of the behavior we wanted.

Dan Roy: Thanks for the interview, Raph.

In addition to designing MMOs, Raph writes a great blog.

My Media in Transition Presentation: Constructing Identities of Mastery in Games

Dan Roy — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 08:43:57 -0600

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

GDC: I Moderated an Impromptu Roundtable about Mobile and Cross-Platform MMOs

Dan Roy — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 23:56:25 -0600

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.

My GDC Presentation: Labyrinth: Keeping the Play in Learning Games

Dan Roy — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 23:28:55 -0600

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.

Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence

Dan Roy — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 01:05:14 -0700

Type: Book

URL:

Amazon Book Listing

Notes:

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.

Terminology

Action-space - A space in which we can perform actions (i.e. have agency)
Telepresence - The feeling of or being present at a distance
Soft self - The self has no strict boundaries and can change
Direct control - controlling something without causal gaps. E.g. controlling our own hands versus controlling a table by controlling our hands. Interestingly, we can learn to eliminate some causal gaps over time, thus directly controlling the table.
Fixed depth - "In telepresence, the extent of our mutual sensory involvement is always fixed in advance."

Presence

If you visit the Virtual Artists' VA Robocam Site (http://www.robocam.va.con.au/) you can interact with a motorized camera mounted on a tall building, sweeping the area as you desire. Comparing the Robocam experience with an experience of purely passive viewing (e.g., the wonderful web camera that looks at the African landscape: www.africam.com) is instructive. The passive experience leaves the observer clearly at home; it is no more like telepresence than looking at the photos in National Geographic (though it is sometimes more exciting). Yet as soon as a distant camera responds to your controls, and especially if the mode of control is either natural (the helmet rig) or highly practical (a gamester with a joystick), you begin to feel relocated, as if you are in the distance scene. Our sense of personal location has more to do with this sense of an action-space than with anything else. (93-4)

Games provide action-spaces, and therefore have an edge in changing our sense of personal location.

The most important kind of disruption is temporal: if there is a noticeable time lag between issuing the command and receiving the sensory feedback, or (worse still) if the time like is variable due to the traffic on phone lines, for instance, the illusion is shattered. (105)

We may still enjoy interacting with the virtual world in spite of lag, but we are unlikely to feel as fully present there as we might.

And isn't there always a kind of "fixed depth" to our teledealings? in the daily world we can zoom in as much as we like. If we suddenly choose to order a pizza into the conference room we can all share the taste and smell of that very pizza. In telepresence, the extent of our mutual sensory involvement is always fixed in advance, by the specific channels and bandwidth available. (111)

Players logging into a virtual world from cell phones and PCs would likely have different "fixed depths" of sensory involvement. Everyone may feel on equal footing until the pizza arrives, figuratively. A guild may be chatting away via voice, including both cell phone and PC players, and then reach a consensus to engage in some activity that preferences PC players (player versus player combat, for instance). At that point, cell phone players may become newly aware of their differently-abledness.

In all the cases we have examined, what matters are the complex feedback loops that connect action-commands, bodily motions, environmental effects, and multisensory perceptual inputs. (114)

Again, interactivity enables presence.

It is when aspects of body or external tools become transparent in use that our intentions "flow-through" the tools to alter the world, that we feel as if we directly control the limbs, or tools, and question, that we begin to feel as if they are part of us. (123)

With virtual worlds on PCs, our initial experience is to consciously push various buttons on the mouse and keyboard to move ourselves through the world. After continued use, though, we think simply that we would like to walk along a virtual road and our avatars do so. A player can certainly tell an onlooker in the real world what keys he pushes to move his avatar, but that's not the way he thinks about it when immersed in the virtual world. He only becomes fully aware of the controls when consciously attempting to analyze them, as when explaining how to move to an onlooker, or when they get in the way. Of course, there are any number of ways that controls could get in the way. They could be less than perfectly responsive (slow, inaccurate). They could cause physical pain from overuse. But, when everything goes well, the controls fade away.

To move the table, I push it with my hands; but to move my hands, I don't need to push anything. This experience of direct responsiveness is a major factor in the creation of our sense of bodily presence. The notion of "direct control" is best meant to rule out a case where we must first control our own bodies and, using them as our instruments, affect something else. Stelarc's Third Hand [a mechanical hand attached to his right arm that he can manipulate with certain muscles], when attached and in use, is part of Stelarc himself in just this sense. The fact that Stelarc must control the hand by first contracting muscles in his legs and abdomen may seem to argue against this, but remember that after a while Stelarc does not experience the control structure that way. Instead, he simply wills the hand to move, and it moves. The fact that this involved a causal detour is unimportant. (130-1)

"Direct control" is important for a sense of presence, but even when the sense of direct control is not there at first, it may develop over time.

Self

Notice that what counts here is not always consciously knowing the time. None of us, I suppose, looks constantly at his or her watch! Rather, the crucial factor is the constant and easy availability of the time, should we desire to know it. Therefore, a prime characteristic of transparent technologies is their poise for easy use and deployment as and when required. (41)

We always "know" the time before looking at our watches because we can easily and quickly find at the time. This could be the same for some virtual world status on a phone, if the checking of the status became fast and easy enough.

Information appliances are transparent technologies, designed to be easy to use, and to fade into the background. They are poised to be taken for granted. (44)

Many of us already take cell phones for granted, even with all of their user interface flaws. This technology will become even more transparent. As it becomes transparent, it becomes part of how we see ourselves.

A recent Warwick University study showed that young people's thumbs have overtaken fingers as the most muscled and dexterous digits among the under-twenty-fives, simply as a result of their extensive use of handheld electronic game controllers and text messaging on cell phones. New generations of phones will be designed around this greater agility, leading to even further changes in manual dexterity and the like, in a golden loop. The same kind of user technology co-adaptation can occur at the deepest levels of neural processing. Such developmentally open brains are not just opportunistic, but explosively opportunistic. They are ready to change themselves to make the most of the structures, media, and opportunities encountered during learning. (86)

We physically adapt to the interface.

Easy access to specific bodies of information, as and when such access is normally required, is all it takes for us to begin to factor such knowledge in as part of the bundle of skills and abilities that we take for granted in our day to day life. It is this bundle of "taken-for-granted" skills, knowledge, and abilities that structures and informed our sense of who we are and what we know. (134)

We are our skills.

There is no self, if by self we mean some central cognitive essence that makes me who and what I am. In its place there is just the "soft self": a rough-and-tumble, control-sharing coalition of processes -- some neural, some bodily, some technological -- and an ongoing drive to tell a story, to paint a picture in which "I" am the central player. (138)

Our views of ourselves are changeable, as are our actual selves.

These [Alzheimer's patients] were a puzzle because although they still lived alone, successfully, in the city, they really should not have been able to do so. On standard psychological tests they performed rather dismally. They should have been unable to cope with the demands of daily life. What was going on?

A sequence of visits to their home environments provided the answer. These home environments, it transpired, were wonderfully calibrated to support and scaffold these biological brains. The homes were stuffed full of cognitive props, tools, and aids. Examples include message centers where they stored notes about what to do and when; photos of family and friends complete with indications of names and relationships; labels and pictures on doors; "memory books" to record new events, meetings, and plans; and "open-storage" strategies in which crucial items (pots, pans, checkbooks) are always kept in plain view, not locked away in drawers.

Taking soft selfhood seriously invites us to reconsider our views and prejudices concerning cognitive rehabilitation and the understanding and depiction of cognitive impairment. The forcible relocation of a home functioning Alzheimer's patient into a controlled hospital setting often constitutes a tragic turning point. Such relocation can be akin to the inflection of new brain damage upon an already compromised host. The moral is: certain harms to the environment are simultaneously harms to the person. Our worlds, ourselves. (140-1)

In some ways, we are our surroundings. If we like who we are, we may not want to leave. Conversely, if we want to change or experiment with who we are, we may want to surround ourselves with new environments like virtual worlds.

Our self-image as a species should not be that of ancient biological minds in colorful young technological clothes. Instead, ours are chameleon mines, factory-primed to merge with what they find and with what they themselves create. (141)

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

Dan Roy — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 01:16:15 -0700

Type: Book

URL:

Amazon Book Listing

Notes:

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.

MMOs As Testbeds for Augmented Reality

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.

Technological Convergence

These separate upgrades in capabilities don't just add to each other; mobile, multimedia, location-sensitive characteristics multiply each other's usefulness. (xv)

Some people look at technological convergence as an unnatural marriage of unrelated capabilities. Why does my cell phone need a camera? I already have a camera. However, having the camera and the phone in the same device doesn't just enable convenient access to old uses, it enables entirely new activities and abilities: videoconferencing, picture messaging, citizen journalism, motion sensitivity, etc. Sometimes it makes sense to add more features into a cell phone just to see what people will do with them.

Connecting People

The young women they observed casually use text messages to say "goodnight," "good morning," or even "I'm bored." (5)

People don't send these messages because they are communicating vital information, they send them to feel connected. It's worth looking at what kinds of features in MMOs could enable players to feel more connected to the game and to each other even when away from their computers.

One of Wellman's claims is that "we find community in networks, not groups." He explained that "a group is a special type of network: densely-knit (most people are directly connected), tightly-bounded (most ties stay within the densely-knit cluster), and multi-stranded (most ties contain many role relationships)," and he challenged conventional thinking about how people cluster socially:

Although people often view the world in terms of groups, they function in networks. In networked societies, boundaries are permeable, interactions are with diverse others, connections switch between multiple networks, and hierarchies can be flatter and recursive." (56-7)

Wow, and most MMOs, do very little to enable networks, focusing instead on groups. For instance, wouldn't it be useful for players to be able to market their unique skills to all players? If a guild needs to fill a slot for a raid, maybe they need a healer who can ward against Fear, they should be able to go to a classifieds listing or social network of the freelance services of highly-rated players. They should be able to browse and search profiles, evaluating potential hires based on experience (dungeons completed), gear, success/failure ratios, ratings from past teammates, current online/off-line status, and asking price. The fact that there is no easy way for guilds to fill these holes means there is no viable role for freelancers. Thus, groups remain connected with each other and more disconnected than necessary from relevant strangers.

Will you be able to use the capabilities of smart mob technologies to know everything you need to know about the world you walk through and to connect with those groups who could benefit you? Will you be allowed to cooperate with anyone your wearable computer helps you choose? Or will others know everything they need to know about you through the sensors you encounter and information you broadcast? (87)

In WoW, players spend lots of time searching for simple, redundant characters like wolves (because quests send them after wolves). People are more interesting than wolves, yet the game severely limits what information players can see about each other. The only things that WoW let's you see about other players are basic information like level, class, race, and equipment. Considering the game is full of players who enjoy navigating social networks on the web, we should make sifting and analyzing data about players more of the focus.

Point your device at a billboard, and see clips of the film or music it advertises, and then buy tickets or download a copy on the spot. (95)

In a modern-day or science-fiction MMO, billboards could advertise actual in-game sales. They could link to a store or auction house. Just like a real economy, players might pay a daily fee for the use of the billboard space to advertise their wares or recruit for their guild. This might be disruptive to WoW's fantasy atmosphere, but it could work well for other games.

Another experiment [...] mediates social encounters by comparing personal profiles automatically and alerting participants in a face-to-face encounter of mutual interests or common friends that they might not know about (a recommendation system for strangers). (172-3)

In WoW, a common interest could be a shared quest or grouping preference. WoW has locations outside most dungeons where players can register as "looking for group," in the hopes of being matched with other players on quests in that dungeon. One of the interactions I'm imagining for mobile devices that extend WoW is dueling with other players in close physical proximity. My phone could notify me that another player is nearby, and we could duel in a way that did not depend on our characters' levels. We would get experience or Honor for the encounter, limited to a certain amount within a certain time period.

Collective Surveillance

A user could access the server computer and add or receive information about specific geographic locations. (92)

If the day comes when millions of people go about their lives while wearing sensor-equipped wearable computers, the population itself could do, collective surveillance: Big Everybody. (187)

In WoW, players create and share location-based data through websites (thottbot) and interface modifications. They share quest tips, the location and frequency of items dropped by felled monsters, the difficulty of play in each location, and more. Blizzard facilitated this by making WoW's interface accessible, but they could have designed even more sharing of information between players into the game. If I'm searching for herbs or minerals along the terrain and one of my teammates sees one, why can't the game notify me directly? It would be like a security system in a prison: a disturbance in any part of the facility is perceived by a guard or a camera or some other sensor and relayed to central security. Players should be sensors for each other.

Cornucopia of the Commons

(Paraphrasing) Cornucopia of the Commons: users contribute the same resource they consume. (118)

Thottbot is a cornucopia of the Commons. Some players just go to the website and consume information, but players who want the information to appear in their interface in the game generally contribute to the thottbot database by automatically uploading information from their play session. wowecon is another example where players upload the auctions they've seen personally in the game's auction house to a website for everyone to analyze. Dueling with another player nearby in physical space is a third example, since the dueling interaction that I consume is the same interaction that I produce and the more people who partake in this activity the easier it is to find partners.

You do a favor for others because you know that one day they will do it for you. The role of the agent in a negotiation is to evaluate the value of favors and keep scores. (173)

This is the way some religions work. Do the right thing because God is watching and you'll get credit. If games had more social currency, they would encourage more greedy altruism. Some MMOs have experimented with mentoring relationships where high-level players have incentives to help low-level players (EverQuest II ). We should see more of this.

Space and Time

A few of the most important questions about quality of life address ways that mobile and pervasive technology usage affects interpersonal relationships, the way individuals experience time, and the vitality of public spaces. (191)

You could always judge a popular, active server by going to the capital city and seeing how many people are milling about. WoW creates vibrant public places in convenient meeting spots. However, it attempts to create a sense of space and time by slowing most travel to realistic speeds. The magnitude of this space frequently hinders me from collaborating with other players who are too far away. And, the time passage that's more meaningful to me is when I'm waiting on people. Whether it's meeting a friend online at a certain time or creating an auction and checking back three hours later to see whether it sold, the player interaction makes the time passage meaningful. Arbitrary 15 minute journeys within the game do not add much meaning.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Dan Roy — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 18:42:46 -0700

Type: Book

URL:

Amazon Book Listing

Notes:

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.

The Stickiness Factor

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.

Many of the game experiences available to players with limited time also have limited depth. Games like Tetris are great, but they do not capture the kinds of experiences players can get from an MMO. When I'm riding a bus, if Tetris is the only game available to me, I'll play it. Or maybe I'll just read or listen to music. Regardless, my thought process is, "I have some free time; how could I fill it?" That's not sticky thinking. I want to design games that provoke this thought process: "I'm really looking forward to the next time I have five minutes free so I can check in on my game. And, if I have half an hour, I can get even more involved."

Connected, persistent, mobile games can allow for and encourage stickiness because they're there when you're thinking about them, whenever that is. It's important that the game world be persistent, because there is an allure in wondering what happened in the game world while you've been away. It's like how I used to look forward to getting e-mail before I started getting too much e-mail. I looked forward to the social contact, the meaning contained within, and the surprise (generally not knowing who would write when about what). E-mail was highly sticky. Now I've become partially immune to the stickiness of the e-mail epidemic, as my hopeful anticipation of each message turned a bit to dread of the endless assaults on my time.

The Law of the Few - Connectors, Mavens, Salesmen

Mobile games, or games with mobile components, are much easier to market virally. Unlike PC and console games which players generally use at home, at least in The States, players frequently consume mobile games outside of the home. This puts players in the vicinity of friends, coworkers, and strangers while playing, making connections between players and non-players much more frequent and probable. Additionally, players are likely to be mavens of whatever game they're playing. And, players effectively act as salesmen to everyone nearby as they silently advertise, "Look how I'm choosing to spend my time and money." Any emotion players show while playing may spark curiosity in nearby observers: "What's he getting so worked up about? I want to see that."

It's a small step to imagine the game incenting players to recruit new people to the game: "For every player you bring in, your team's ranks and resources expand." If the observer and player are friends, the player will feel comfortable enough to ask the observer to join the game, and the observer will want to do a favor for the player as well as satisfy her own curiosity about the game. Let's say the player does convince the observer to join the game. Now, whenever the two of them see each other, they will probably discuss the game as a convenient and relevant conversation starter. This not only strengthens both of their bonds to the game, which now functions as a social lubricant, but their interaction makes the game that much more intriguing to additional observers (especially if they play together in public).

MIT Futures of Entertainment Conference Webcasts Posted

Dan Roy — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 17:29:43 -0700

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").

Via Henry Jenkins's blog.