Kill Ten Rats

Jay Moore had the opening speech at IMGDC, and it included a point I think many people need: getting a sustainable job in the gaming industry is hard.

Many people want a job making games, which is great if you are an executive. No matter how low the salary, how many hours, or how poor of working conditions, people will apply. As fast as you burn through employees, more will be graduating with minimal training and dreams of making the next WoW or Halo. Elder Game hypothesizes that MMOs could be a refuge from this, because they need survivors to run the live game, but much of the industry is self-cannibalizing. Every highly caffeinated 20-something in perpetual crunch mode makes it that much harder for you to make a career.

That ignores the little problem of revenue. 90% of everything is crud, and there is a good chance your game will not break even. Not you, you did a great job, but those other guys screwed up, or management destroyed it, or the market was not ready for your product, or you got lost in a big release month. However it happens, sustainable applies not just to your ability to survive the job but for the job to keep existing.

With high labor supply and limited demand, the pay is low, the jobs are few, and your players will complain about you at least as much as you complain about the current developers. You face a fickle market where faked screenshots and bribed magazines can trump good gameplay. But you do get to have your dream job.

: Zubon

This is a good post, and I recommend reading the whole thing, but the most important point to me is what do you spend your time doing in-game? And is it fun?

If you expect your players to spend most of their time at the level cap, the post-cap game is rather important, ya know? If most WoW players are at the cap, those raids and/or the PvP better be lots of fun, or else hitting the cap is a suggestion that people quit playing your game. Maybe alts are lots of fun; that’s how we roll in City of Heroes.

That is not a suggestion that you make time-to-cap take longer. If the leveling game is fun, people will make alts to keep playing it. They will keep running your quests for the fun, even without experience points. If not, a longer time-to-cap is bad because it means less fun in your game, although really it means throw away your entire game, because we already have dozens of level-based MMOs, some of which are pretty good.

I’ll rephrase that last point: if your game is 250 hours to the level cap, make sure your game has at least 250 hours of leveling fun, and 1000 would be better so that people can play some alts. If your game is 2000 hours to the level cap (hello classic EQ) … I’m betting there was not 2000 hours of fun, so let’s move on. Once you have players at the level cap, you need enough hours of fun there to keep them playing. And no, taking the same amount of fun and trying to stretch it out by lowering xp/encounter or making you re-run each part until it is not fun does not work: that just increases global suck.

: Zubon

Lori Drew has been indicted for using MySpace. If you haven’t heard of the case, she allegedly created a false profile as a teenage boy, started an online relationship with a neighbor girl, then drove her to suicide. I turn to Orin Kerr for the gamer-relevant part:

To understand this case, you need to understand the government’s theory. The indictment is not charging Drew with harassment. Nor are they charging her with homicide. Rather, the government’s theory in this case is that Drew criminally trespassed onto MySpace’s server by using MySpace in a way that violated MySpace’s Terms of Service (TOS).

Here’s the idea. The TOS required Drew to provide accurate registration information, not to harass or harm other people, and not to promote conduct that was abusive. She didn’t comply with these terms, the theory goes, so she was criminally trespassing onto MySpace’s computer when she was logging into her account. The indictment turns this into a federal felony conspiracy charge by arguing that she did this in concert with others to obtain information and to further tortious conduct — intentional infliction of emotional distress — violating the felony provisions of 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(2).

In other words, logging on while violating the TOS is the same thing as hacking the servers. Further bad behavior makes it a felony. As a legal theory, Prof. Kerr suggests, this is not a winner. But if it is, your MMO can not only ban goldfarmers/spammers but also put them in federal prison. And that also applies to people who were banned for abusive language, since this case is explicitly about violating the TOS to inflict emotional damage.

: Zubon

When using caffeine, your target dose is 100mg. This may vary based on body size and tolerance, but 100mg is an average effective dose. You get this from one cup of coffee (mug-sized), one espresso, three cans of cola, two cans of Mountain Dew, or ten candy bars. It should take effect in about 15 minutes and ward off sleepiness for about 4 hours.

If you can, save caffeine use for when you need it. Complete tolerance develops somewhere in the neighborhood of 1g per day. At that point, you need the caffeine to function properly, and you will go into withdrawal without it. Mild overdose begins around 300mg (remember that it wears off and no longer “counts” after four hours), and 10g is the average amount to kill a human. That is about five liters of espresso, so you are unlikely to reach 10g without pills.

If you are staying up late playing, make sure that you are not too drowsy to tank. Caffeine does not counteract the effects of alcohol. An awake drunk is still drunk, and if you are too drunk to drive, you are too drunk to heal me.

: Zubon

Information taken from Alertness Solutions, Wikipedia, and reading the sides of cans.