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Oh, the Controversy!

Pundits across the board must have had some soul-bearing New Year’s resolutions. No longer will they toe the line. They will say what they have to, goddammit! It seems that this was also the week to strike. The surprising thing is that most MMO blogs around the ‘sphere have been pretty tame when it came to 2011 predictions and 2011 posts. It has been the big gamesites that are deciding to no longer be kept down by The Man.  In no particular order:

Continue reading Oh, the Controversy!

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

2011 – Hopes, Dreams, Fears

I am too antsy to work. Most community managers on the West Coast aren’t even awake, but it is the first business day of 2011. The 2011. The Year of the MMO. It feels like something should be coming any second, but I have to tell myself that things were not so different a week ago. All morning I have been trying to write this post. What are my baseless speculations on the MMO genre this year?

Continue reading 2011 – Hopes, Dreams, Fears

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

Scheduling and Potential Apologies

In a very unusual turn of events, I will be offline for most of the next two weeks. In fact, I am already there, having scheduled posts for my absence. I will apologize now if any of them turn out to be really inappropriate due to events that had not happened when I scheduled them. Nice boat.

I have the last of the Cognitive Surplus quotes scheduled. Also apologies to Clay Shirky and his publishers if I have gone beyond fair use. There are lots of good ideas to discuss here. I presume I am helping business more than hurting it, but that’s your call if you want me to take posts down. (The potential irony is noted, yes.)

: Zubon

Annual Safe Driving PSA

I am heading to my usual weekend-long New Year’s LAN party, and while I may no longer work for the state traffic safety office, I want to remind you to drive safely wherever you may be celebrating.

The worst time for alcohol-involved traffic crashes is midnight to 4am on January 1. Having a sober driver is a given, but I recommend celebrating somewhere you can sleep. As you know from your PUGs, you are not the problem, that other guy is, and that other driver lost count after the fourth tequila. Do not be between him and the tree. In case he missed the tree, watch for him in the morning. Your body processes about 1 drink per hour, so many people will be waking up still drunk.

If you are transporting alcohol to or from a party, put it in your trunk. There will be extra police out. You do not want questions about open container laws, and anything with a broken seal is “open.”

And if you are staying home, remember: don’t drink and tank.

: Zubon