Month: January 2008

Touching one last moment on the Roberts-Castronova podcast, in this election year I like the comparison between feature creep and the political need to “do something.” Games that try to do everything usually do most things poorly. The candidates will promise to solve every problem under the sun, including contradictory “problems,” and they are not even using a test server to check for unintended consequences.

A call for limited government is a desire to end feature creep in the legislature. Federalism is beta-testing before trying to upload new things to the central server.

: Zubon

Returning to yesterday’s discussion of the Roberts-Castronova podcast, they also discuss how virtual worlds reflect on our non-fun-based economy and jobs.

First, they note that few people have problems with different outcomes given equality of opportunity. This is mostly true: we think of our games as a meritocracy, where skill and/or time invested will yield results. The equality is not perfect, and we hear more from the dissatisfied. “I play rock. Nerf paper. Scissors is fine.” We prefer that games favor the exact balance of skill and time that we bring to the table, and it is always easy to think that The Other is being favored unfairly. Many people question whether opportunities can ever be equal when lawyers play alongside college students: different people start the game with differing amounts of time and money.

I like the discussion of the artisan economy. In real life, specialization and division of labor are the drivers of productivity and prosperity. That is book one, chapter one, sentence one of Adam Smith. Our in-game worlds are often structured such that an individual can do everything, and the transaction costs of trade are greater than the benefits of specialization. We like being able to do everything ourselves, and we are not alienated from our labor when we can start with ore and end with a sword. Or when we start with a sword and end with a shinier loot sword.

Linking the two, we work as we wish and yield gains accordingly. Farm for gold when you need it, use the auction house as you will, play an alt today and raid tomorrow: the system is designed to let you exercise your options, rather than constraining you to a single path. That could cause interesting effects on jobs and careers if new workers expect that flexibility. We already have a younger generation that more quickly changes jobs and expects rewards and fulfillment.

Finally, we want to earn things. We get no satisfaction from having something given to us, and we would quickly get bored with a “game” of picking up gold pieces off the ground.

: Zubon

The obvious answer to the question is “To keep from dying while fighting difficult mobs.” But that doesn’t actually answer the underlying question: Why healers at all?

Continue reading Why Do We Need Healers?

One of ours talks to one of … a different group with which I associate myself. Edward Castronova of Terra Nova fame spends 72 minutes with Russ Roberts on the economics and sociology of online worlds. I think the early parts make an appropriate sacrifice of specificity for clarity (for a lay audience). I was surprised to hear that Prof. Castronova has never used the Linden Exchange.

An early topic is whether and why people are moving to Permutation City. Online worlds are designed for human happiness, community, and a large degree of meritocracy and equality of opportunity. Why wouldn’t you want to spend time in a world designed for your happiness, surrounded by like-minded people? Permanent flow.

I do not know that I support the view of virtual reality as a “fantasy world,” as opposed to a new world of our creation. I interact with people around the world through the internet, often with more meaning than the social pulp I have in meatspace. If we can create artificial intelligences, the majority of conscious minds in existence may not have carbon-based bodies. Will the children of our minds pity the children of our genes, bound to mortality? We may yet shed these fleshy fetters and join all our children at Omega Point.

: Zubon

Russ Roberts uses the phrase “going to the next level.” I choose to interpret that as “leveling up” rather than liquid evil.

MMOs have become more and more focused on solo players and there are many reasons for this. Many people are out there, like me, that just don’t have the time to find a group or else they are worried about having to leave in the middle of something and making the group angry. I claim this is a game design flaw and instead of designing in heavy solo content, games should be focusing on ways to take advantage of the fact that a large number of people are playing the same game at the same time.

Lets take a look at groups in general. Currently many people shy away from “pick up groups” because either they end up with someone that doesn’t know how to play very well and thus harming the group’s advancement or else they are worried something in real life will force them to have to leave too soon. Therefore, they end up playing solo. If a game was to focus instead on making grouping up fun no matter the group make up, and make it easy for people to come and go easily, it would change the interest levels of the players towards grouping in general.

Continue reading Where Did The Social Go?

Sure it’s a working title code name, but it what does it imply?

His new focus, post-pitching, will be to oversee the development of a still-unnamed and shrouded-in-mystery massively multiplayer role-playing game (MMORPG) that goes by the working title Copernicus.

More fun:

…the game is based on a new IP that he says will include deliberate and strategically planned brand extensions into film, TV, books, comics, and action figure iterations.

Oh nevermind, Inhibitor already figured it all out.

– Ethic

This will be my last Gödel, Escher, Bach reference for a while, I promise. This echoes gound that (I think) Raph covered in his Theory of Fun.

This is, it seems to me, a general principle: you get bored with something not when you have exhausted its repertoire of behavior, but when you have mapped out the limits of the space that contains its behavior.

I have cited this previously as sphexishness and piercing the veil. You don’t need to beat the game if you can see how to beat the game. At that point, it is just a series of motions. All mental activity is done, although you might enjoy the physical act of mastering the motions (more so in meatspace than “hitting the buttons in the right order”).

In MMOs, we have the grind: repeat x 5000 times to level. Many single-player games having something to be brute forced, such as perfecting the timing on a dozen jumps in a row (missing one means starting over, maybe a long run away) or randomly mixing together three potions to see what the combinations do. You might as well look up what the right combination is, because there is neither fun nor virtue in trying every combination until you get the right one.

We MMO players are probably too tied to our games. Can there really be enough content in a game to entertain you for years, not months? It is an unreasonable expectation, and we should not leave to bitterly once we have seen what all the game can do for us. The only reason you were sticking around in the end was for the people you played with or against. It is fitting that Mr. Hofstadter continues: “The behavior space of a person is just about complex enough that it can continually surprise other people…”

: Zubon

I had written a rather lengthy rant about the state of the industry and all of the things that just drive me to insanity, particularly design problems, mishandled operations, stupid funding deals, etc. etc. etc. After I wrote it and had some time to sleep on it, I decided that 2008 is a new year, and thus full of promise and potential. I’d rather set the tone with some optimism and deal with the scurvy side of the industry later in the year…

Continue reading Looking forward to 2008

I do not drink much soda, abstaining for weeks at a time last year. For the extended weekend’s New Year’s LAN party, we binged. My body was not prepared to deal with that much caffeine and carbonation. My wife, a devoted consumer of Diet Pepsi, was pretty wired after drinking half a case of Mountain Dew.

We are both still kind of ill from the experience. My thought had been that I am getting too old for living off Mountain Dew and fast food for days at a time, but I realized that I never did that. This makes me feel even older, because apparently I was never young. I went directly from 15 to 45, and I have stayed there.

Taco Bell’s spicy chicken burritos are tasty. Mozzarella sticks are just deep-fried cheese with breading; see the earlier comment about not living off biohazards. Despite that, cheeseburger fries sound tastier than they should.

Mello Yello is still out there, but Coca-Cola seems to have realized that “mellow” is not a competing force with Mountain Dew. This weekend was my first exposure to Vault, labeling itself an energy drink/soda hybrid. Wow, that tastes awful. If you drown the “citrus” flavored drink in orange juice, it does not taste bad, but you might as well mix the orange juice with peach schnapps. Wait, I don’t drink. I have all these wild oats, completely unsown.

: Zubon

The energy drink link is a video, maybe a little NSFW.