Category: General

General

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Quote of the Day

Yeeno Fernbottom reacts to another blog post on the acidic reaction to Cataclysm:

More to the point, what really mystifies me about some MMO commentators is that once they decide they don’t like a game, they can’t seem to get past it. They act like a jilted lover, or the victim of a war crime. For ever after whenever a particular MMO is mentioned they can’t help but pipe up about how “sucky” it is. If the MMO that burned them happens to be something popular like LoTRO or WoW, they may even concoct all sorts of bizarre explanations as to why a game that “obviously sucks” can be entertaining to so many players. Usually it boils down to something along the lines of “I simply have much better taste/ am a much better gamer than the mentally deficient masses that inhabit that shallow carnival ride.” So endearing, not at all arrogant…

This is a point that is so core, in my opinion, to being a well-rounded blogger. There are so many people playing all the games you ignore or don’t like. Must be a reason, hmmm? Another reason to make comments in first person rather than making a statement for everybody.

–Ravious

Horrible Introductions

I picked up Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY on the holiday Steam sale. Before you even start, the business side of this game makes it clear that it hates you and any of the game developers who want you to like the game. It incorporates at least four kinds of security, required me to sign up for a new account that I needed to verify twice, and returns the same error message when any of the seven-plus steps to start the game did not work. Sign in, update Steam, update the game, sign in, download profile, update your Live account, I think I missed a step or three, and there are definitely at least six loading screens worth of companies who thought this would be a good time to advertise themselves. Because while you are putting hurdles in your players’ paths, putting your corporate logo on those hurdles is the way to make friends. Oh, and Windows Live helpfully mentions that it may reboot your computer. And it does not update to the latest version in one attempt, so you repeatedly go through the multiple log-ins and multiple loading screens until it is happy. The reboot warning was actually helpful; Windows Live needed to reboot to finish updating, and didn’t, and didn’t mention it, so the lack of reboot was the only indication (?) of a problem.

It may make more sense to buy a legitimate copy then just download a pirated version without all the BS. Pirates actually care if the game is playable. As I type this, my irritation is strong enough to rub off on FF XIV and DCUO because related companies are advertising themselves as involved. Oh, and Steam? Having the same button for “exit to the Steam community” and “close this pop-up window”? You’re being idiots too.

The game itself is excellent, and I will likely have comments on it to come.

: Zubon

Parents on Parents

When parents want to give other parents unsolicited advice, it’s always to be a reminder rather than a preacher. There are simply too many unknown variables in the incredibly complex equation it takes to equal a family for an outsider to make many “laws of parenting.” Very good messages to start the new year with; just have to be careful about the delivery.

Anecdotally, my toddler (1.75 yo) used to give me raspberries on my stomach. I miss those since she’d rather stand on my stomach now (good for strength exercises) or give me a fist bump. I often wonder if I got enough of those raspberries.*

–Ravious
i know it was you, fredo

*Good parents already know the answer.

Trapped in the Cut-Scene

In my Lego Universe post I briefly mentioned how I was killed (well, “smashed”) because I was stuck in a cut-scene that was not possible to skip. LU has a lot of cut-scenes, including sight seeing ones you have to do for an achievement in every zone. On my other Christmas game that I just finished, Golden Sun Dark Dawn, the developers seem to have fallen deeply in love with cut-scenes. The Golden Sun games have a lot of cut-scenes to start with, and a lot of fun combat animations, but this one seemed to pause for story scenes as much as the last two games combined! Great game though, don’t get me wrong. In thinking about it more, LoTRO only has a few cut-scenes, and they are generally fairly well recieved.

A case of less is more?

Finding the Mouse

Cognitive Surplus circles back around to that first video, ending on the story of the little girl looking for the mouse to interact with Dora. “Here’s something four-year-olds know: … media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.” The lure of interactivity is what makes our MMO world so compelling. The gameplay rarely beats what you can get in most single-player games. We are here for the shared world, for each other, and in some cases for the chance to help build that world we share. I hope that we are building a world full of people used to changing the world, although I fear that we are instead conditioning people to expect incremental personal achievement in a world that reverts back the moment you stop paying attention.

: Zubon

Start Small

Projects that will work only if they grow large generally won’t grow large; people who are fixated on creating large-scale future success can actually reduce the possibility of creating the small-scale here-and-now successes needed to get there. A veritable natural law in social media is that to get to a system that is large and good, it is far better to start with a system that is small and good and work on making it bigger than to start with a system that is large and mediocre and working on making it better.
— Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

EVE Online is a good example of the former. I have about a dozen MMO examples of the latter.

: Zubon

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