Category: General

General

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Selling Slots

Kill Ten Rats authors have previously come out for selling RMT fluff, and have featured games that use that funding model. What games will sell you more character slots? Guild Wars does. Sword of the New World effectively does so, selling slots for in-game currency that you can buy with meatspace dollars.

For the player, this offers convenience and potential savings. All your characters are associated with one account, so you have one monthly fee, you need not re-buy the expansions, and any special account upgrades (RMT fluff, veteran rewards, etc.) apply to your new characters. Keep all your characters on the same global name in City of Heroes.

For the developer, this has some advantages over trying to sell second accounts. You have fewer of the problems that arise from people using multiple characters at once, many who will not but another account will pay a one-time upgrade fee (maybe multiple times), and you get that money now. Policing for discipline is easier when the player is not a hydra. The only ongoing cost is storing more characters per account (perhaps not insubstantial).

Let’s say $5 for one additional slot per server, and you must buy at least four at a time to prevent transaction costs from eating the money. Alternately, you could have several subscription options, some of which offer more character slots or other premium services, but you would need to decide what to do if a guy with a 16-character account wants to cut back to a non-premium account.

: Zubon

Rounders and Accumulators

This is one of my favorite insights.

ROUNDERS: This group rounds things off. A problem that’s a two on a scale of one to ten gets rounded to zero. If a rounder has five problems that are all about a two on a scale of one to ten, he’ll tell you he has no problems.

ACCUMULATORS: Accumulators add up all the little problems until they equal one big problem. If an accumulator has five problems that are each a two on a scale of one to ten, that feels like having one problem that’s a ten.

Rounders are generally happy, because they perceive their lives to be mostly problem-free. Accumulators are often miserable because “nothing is going right.”

If you are a rounder, a game can have a thousand bugs without there being any real problem, because no single one is large enough to be a deal-breaker. On the other hand, six rounds up to a ten, so any fairly big thing could end it all.

If you are an accumulator, the problems keep stacking up. A typo here, a pathing error there, and eventually a 3% too long load time is the final straw. You quit with a forum post listing a dozen broken things, and you get really angry when the rounders dismiss them one at a time instead of seeing the big picture.

So are you the idiot who puts up with anything until one slightly more buggy than usual patch crosses your threshold into the apocalypse? Or are you the idiot who cannot work around minor bugs while the game finds its legs? And don’t you hate that other kind idiot who just cannot see what is wrong here?

: Zubon

Monitors of the Future

Why waste money on that big monitor when you could have two tiny ones?

Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

That’s right, we are on our way to Rainbows End with augmented reality. If you want immersive gameplay, project the game onto your retina. Tiny solar cells can bring power and your new monitor can also correct your vision, or why not go beyond that to built-in image-enhancement, binoculars, or wireless input from cameras in the area? Bonus points for the first guy who puts his vision as an ongoing real-time webcast, which will get surreal when the live broadcast is him editing that web page.

This will revolutionize porn.

: Zubon

Legislative Feature Creep

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

Reflecting Worlds

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

Merging Worlds

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.

Where Did The Social Go?

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?