Zubon

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Cost Disease

GM-run events in MMOs do not scale well, and their compromises mean they pretty much have to be lousy.

MMO PvE content is designed to scale well, in whatever way it scales in your game. If you make a good quest or instance, you can have it running on hundreds of servers at very little additional cost. Having 10,000,000 people play WoW takes far less developer time than having 100,000 people play each of 100 MMOs. This is mass-production, with increasing returns to scale. Computers are good at copying the same thing for more people.

Developer-piloted NPCs do not scale well. They can be in only one place. If you want that NPC to appear in more than one zone or on more than one server, you need multiple humans to pilot them. Programmed and scripted events can be copied, but the human interaction portion cannot. If you want to give every server an equal experience, you are going to need a script, reducing the human element; you are going to need either staggered starts or a large team; and if you have staggered starts, you need some way to cope with people from the fifth server knowing the script already. Sadly, the end point must always be the same, because you cannot support divergent servers. Any human interaction affects only the storytelling, not the plot.

If the developers of EVE Online, Darkfall, or A Tale in the Desert (all sandbox-y games in increasing order of PvP hardcore-ness) want an event, they can go do it. There is a server or two. They do not need to worry about divergence or repeat performances. Single-server architecture is a grand thing. Similarly, players can run their own events and affect the world. Even if most of the “events” are from people who want to watch the world burn, you have a much larger upside potential.

: Zubon

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Shirky’s Call to Action

The choice we face is this: out of the mass of our shared cognitive surplus, we can create an Invisible University–many Invisible Colleges doing the hard work of creating many kinds of public and civic value–or we can settle for Invisible High School, where we get lolcats but no open source software, fan fiction but no improvement in medical research. The Invisible High School is already widespread, and our ability to participate in ways that reward personal or communal value is in no imminent danger.
— Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

: Zubon

Over-Saled

In the last round of Steam sales, I bought a game at 50% off. A few days later, it went to 75% off. My plan on Steam games is increasingly to wait until I want to play it right now, and then keep waiting until there is a 50+% sale. I have been trained to avoid good sales because of potential buyer’s remorse after great sales.

: Zubon

Communities Managing Civic Value

Assumptions that people are selfish can become self-fulfilling prophecies, creating systems that provide lots of individual freedom to act but not a lot of public value or management of collective resources for the greater public good. … Conversely, systems that assume people will act in ways that create public goods, and that give them opportunities and rewards for doing so, often let them work together better than neoclassical economics would predict.
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[I]n some cases the group using the resource can manage it better than either the market or the state. Such arrangements among the group often rely on repeated communications and interactions among the participants. [Elinor] Ostrum’s work noted that such shared management often relied on mutually visible action among the participants, credible commitment to the shared goals, and group members’ ability to punish infractions. When these conditions are met, people with the largest stake in the resources can do a better job both in managing the resource and in policing infractions than can markets or government systems designed to accomplish the same goals. [Zubon notes: see also Ronald Coase, both for Coase Theorem and theory of the firm.] … This internalization relies on the finding demonstrated by the Ultimatum Game; namely that people in social circumstances will moderate their behavior to be less selfish.
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[P]rior to the present historical generation, motivating unpaid actors to do anything for the civic good was left to governments and nonprofits, themselves institutional actors. Today we can take on some of those problems ourselves, but the more we want to do so at the civic end of the scale, the more we have to bind ourselves to one another to achieve (and celebrate) shared goals.
— Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

: Zubon

Becoming Hardcore: Dark Age of Camelot

My wife still bears a grudge against Dark Age of Camelot. That’s fair. I started playing around the time we moved in together, and I played it a lot.

After college, my group of friends spread across many time zones. At various times we had people in California, Texas, Arizona, Michigan, Japan, Australia, China, and the Philippines. We decided to schedule online gaming a few times a week, plus however often we could catch each other in-game. Our attempts at taking a pen-and-paper game online were not entirely enjoyable (software for that has come a ways, with voice chat these days if nothing else), and many of us were excited about Dark Age of Camelot, so we joined Albion.

Continue reading Becoming Hardcore: Dark Age of Camelot

Creating Civic Value

These different kinds of participation don’t mean that we should never have lolcats and fan fiction communities–it’s just that anything at the personal and communal end of the spectrum isn’t in much danger of going away, or even of being under-provisioned. It’s hard to imagine a future where someone asks himself, “Where, oh where can I share a picture of my cute kitten?” Almost by definition, if people want that kind of value, it will be there. It’s not so simple with public and especially civic value. As Gary Kamiya has noted of today’s web, “You can always get what you want, but you can’t always get what you need.” The kinds of things we need are produced by groups pursuing public value.

We should care more about public and civic value than about personal or communal value because society benefits more from them, but also because public and civic value are harder to create. The amount of public and civic value we get out of cognitive surplus is an open question, and one strongly affected by the culture of the groups doing the sharing, and by the culture of the larger society that those groups are embedded in. As Dean Kamen, the inventor and entrepreneur puts it, “In a free culture, you get what you celebrate.”
— Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

: Zubon

Matting

I have a couple of recent posts on game elements that seem unnecessary. But I wonder sometimes. To what extent can intentionally impeding gameplay improve the overall experience? Or do we really demand perpetual orgasm?

Consider the case of forced grouping. Solo MMO PvE is convenient, filled with steady progression, and not terribly intellectually stimulating. By definition, the lowest common denominator works for pretty much everyone, but it provides few truly great experiences. The inconvenience and downtime of forced grouping trades off with a better potential experience, and we perhaps find stronger social bonds where grouping is forced. You will get more out of an MMO if you socially interact, but it is easy to stay safe and solo. Do we get similar benefits from going back to town more often? It gives us a designated place for social interaction and a reason to be there. I do not know how much that is in use or how the effect shrinks as you move away from capital cities to smaller quest hubs.

Downtime itself presumably affects our perception of the experience. It would be nice if we could value a high emotional plateau properly, but human psychology does not seem to work that way. Huge increases in the standard of living lead to only moderate increases in happiness, because we develop a new standard. Humans could very well prefer (on a scale of 1 to 10) the experience sequence 5 5 10 5 10 5 1 5 10 10 5 10 to 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10. I cannot see anything in our evolutionary environment that would have selected for properly enjoying a steady stream of perfect experiences; how often would that have happened in the ancestral wilderness?

Assume for argument that our species is economically rational enough to value the string of 10s at least as much as the mixed series, although perhaps not as much as all those 10s might imply. The string of 10s is inefficient. It is hard to make a 10, and you are not going to get it right every time even if you are really good. If you can get 90% of the value with 4 or 5 10s in a mixed series, you can get two great series for the cost of one perfect series (plus your recycled failures, half-assed attempts, and projects from interns), nearly doubling the perceived value of your content by mixing in lower quality content to spread it out. That worries me about our species. If you said I could improve my food by adding pebbles, because the lows spread and help us appreciate the highs, I would smack you.

But you can plausibly say that rich or spicy food can dull the palate through superstimulus. Quiet moments are often underappreciated, and they are when we can appreciate things we have experienced. But there are better and worse ways to have downtime, and it always chafes to be forced into it rather than finding your own level.

: Zubon

Frozen Sharing

Sharing a photo by making it available online constitutes sharing even if no one ever looks at it. This “frozen sharing” creates great potential value. Enormous databases of images, text, videos, and so on include many items that have never been looked at or read, but it costs little to keep those things available, and they may be useful to one person, years in the future. That tiny bit of value may seem too small to care about, but with two billion potential providers, and two billion potential users, tiny value times that scale is huge in aggregate. Much creative energy that was previously personal has acquired a shared component, even if only in frozen sharing.
— Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

Our fellow MMO bloggers will be familiar with the phenomenon of getting comments or sudden bursts of hits on old posts. Dig those trailing comment dates as people still reminisce about AC2, wonder what happened at the end of Borderlands, and read your Death Knight leveling guide from 2008. Feel free to comment with a link your favorite “wow, people are still looking at this” post from your site.

: Zubon

Alt Souls

I have nothing useful to add to existing reviews of Rift as it stands in beta. It seems to be an evolutionary improvement on existing MMOs, but nothing grabs me by the lapels and says I must play. In the first few rifts I have encountered, I am not seeing the “2.0” part of “PQ 2.0”; the first Defiant rift parallels the first Chaos PQ nicely, down to the boss that dies in less than 10 seconds because every character will see that PQ/rift. If you like the current crop of MMOs and want a better one, Rift is for you. The downside is trying to get all your friends to quit WoW to go play it. I could not even get my friends to play WoW on the same server.

One encouraging thing is how the soul system affects altoholics. I have long been asking for the ability to play multiple classes on the same character. Now I can. If I level-cap four characters, I have access to every possible class and class combination in the game, and I would be able to swap between at least a dozen of them in less than a minute. That is really handy. Most have been referring to souls as talent trees, which they are, but they are also how you cram the usual 8-16 classes into 4 base classes. You even get overlap within those 4, such every base class can fill multiple roles, rather than just having minor varieties on how you deal damage.

: Zubon

From Personal to Civic Value

Increases in personal satisfaction, though, are not all that’s at stake. In terms of social, as opposed to individual, value, we care a lot about how our cognitive surplus gets used. Participating in [crowdsourced crisis information] creates more value for society than participating in [making lolcats]; making and sharing open source software creates value for more people than making and sharing Harry Potter fan fiction. The value from Ushahidi or open source software is more than the sum of the personal satisfactions of the participants; nonparticipants also derive value from the effort. You can think of this scale of value as rising from personal to communal to public to civic.
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One such form is personal sharing, done among otherwise uncoordinated individuals; think ICanHasCheezburger. Another, more involved form is communal sharing, which takes place inside a group of collaborators; think Meetup.com groups for post-partum depression. Then there is public sharing, when a group of collaborators actively wants to create a public resource; think the Apache software project [or Wikipedia]. Finally, civic sharing is when a group is actively trying to transform society; think Pink Chaddi. The spectrum from personal to communal to public to civic describes the degree of value created for participants versus nonparticipants.
— Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

Our MMO world tends strongly towards communal sharing, where even our public sharing (a wiki for every game) is mostly of value within the community, but see tomorrow’s post about how that value expands.

: Zubon