Easily Distracted

I’m at the developer roundtable.
Dan Norton, Raph Koster, Jesse Houston, Nick Fortugno, Mike Sellers

[Me: Thank god for these guys, just as an aside: developers interested in exploratory conversations about the form, who don’t just stare at people and say, “It’s all under NDA, everything is under NDA, my breakfast cereal is under NDA”.]

Raph Koster: there’s much less diversity in MMOs, no experimentation.

Mike Sellers: it’s easier to talk about the few places where something is changing. Mike says even Eve Online is “kill monsters, get gold” [ME: I don’t really think so]. In some respects, tools are less sophisticated now than they were in the 1990s. So question is, where are the little mammals that will survive if the dinosaur designs die? Says, “Maybe the little games in Facebook”.

Nick Fortugno: We conflate too many things together, an MMO doesn’t have to be a fantasy RPG. Why does everything get defined by World of Warcraft? Massively multiple participation before these technologies was about voting, other kinds of big social experiences; we don’t have a deep imagination of what a game with 10,000 people might be.

Jesse Houston: Let’s stop talking about WoW as the winner. It isn’t a winner, it’s a benchmark.

Raph Koster: WoW just has as many players as a bad little cable show that’s heading for cancellation. [ME: 1. Guys, stop talking about WoW: it always makes developers look like sour grapes purveyors. 2. NO individual game scales well against other popular culture.]

Mike Sellers: there are more bird-watchers or NASCAR fans than MMO players.

Dan Norton: let’s be positive!

Mike Sellers: I want to stay negative for a moment. Virtual worlds aren’t real the way lots of things are real. Maybe we’re just talking about buggy whips or player-pianos. [ME: but Mike, when player pianos had a big market, player piano makers talked about them. Should they have stopped talking about them then because someday there was going to be an iPod Touch? By that context, stop talking about airplanes, televisions, etc.]

Mike Sellers: publics are media and entertainment agnostic, meaning they’ll move on. Who cares about Joanie Loves Chachi these days, for example? [ME: Mike! Take a look!]

Nick: Learning curve difficulties, ossification of the form as obstacle to new players. If these are skewed always to people with huge amounts of time, they’ll never evolve.

Raph: average in all virtual worlds, even pre-graphics, is 20 hours/week. So economies, graphics, etc., doesn’t make a difference in terms of engaging players. The nature of the engagement hasn’t changed.

Quick exchanges between whole panel: upshot, we’re not as mass market as we could be, some things are. [ME: GUYS WHY IS BEING THE MOST MASSIFIED THING POSSIBLE THE GOAL? Seriously, not even television or movie producers imagine that the film they are making must have total penetration of the mass market to succeed.]

Jesse: We need tools for players to take more control over experience of play.

Raph: I’ve tried.

Nick: We have to approach games keeping in mind what they are for people, what they expect.

Raph: Dancing is my poster child in MMO design. There was dancing in text muds, then it went away in graphic MMOs, then I got a lot of people asking for dancing in SWG, so I put it in. But a lot of people complained, why are you spending time on dancing as a design? But now we have dancing in every MMO. [ME: Did AC, EQ, UO really not have a /dance emote? I can’t remember.] So we need things that have common cultural touchstones in MMOs.

Nick: A lot of emergent behaviors in earlier MMOs have become codified, and then become expectations for hard-coded design structures in all subsequent MMOs. Strong tied people: my real friends VS. my acquaintances/loose ties.

Mike: MMOs today are good at supporting strong tied connections, actually, not weak ties though.

Raph: agree with Mike. They cluster people a lot, they make strong ties, and that’s as much a design consequence as a social prior. We should figure out how to support ‘weak ties’ better–that’s what something like ‘Mafia Wars’ does.

Nick: But I think there’s been lots of experimentation with weak ties in MMOs and not so much trying to imagine in new ways dealing with strong ties. But weak ties are what’s new and interesting in our world, and these technologies, so it’s where all our attention should be.

Mike: intentional communities as an interesting way to think about weak ties. But it’s very risky to experiment with novel forms for intentional communities.

Nick: when casual games started, we were very surprised by the people who played them, we thought it would be the same people who were already gamers. So suddenly there are conventions for casual games: don’t ever use the keyboard, don’t use the right mouse button, etc. So the way forward is to look at the interactive conventions that exist for an audience. You want what’s natural, e.g. Wii Sports. [ME: But what’s ‘natural’ in physical, real-world games like golf and tennis has layers of complexity, too: there’s the casual golf and the serious golf in the real world too]

Mike: All other software besides games has an external task it has to satisfy, some external need; a game has to create the task that will be fun.

Raph: there is a collision between making the game challenging vs. increasing sociability. Can you make a better chat system? Yes. But does it make the game worse? Yes. Instancing makes the game run better, but it ruins the social system. Travel is treated as a nuisance in virtual worlds, but it forces people to have social connections to people near them, not always be where their friends are. In-world economies need more travel, but we don’t think about that.

Dan: Are there things that players expect in MMOs that you wish had never happened? Features you’d love to eradicate forever?

Jesse: I wish guilds had less rigid structures, and there were more innovative structures supported.

Mike: We did have other structures in Meridan 59. But then you have to support those variations, and that’s a design burden. So we moved towards a norm, which takes relatively minimal and modular design.

Raph: I would kill levels and classes. They’re rigid and limiting. [ME: But then why does Metaplace, a fairly social world, have levels????]

Mike: Asheron’s Call’s allegiances were a non-guild system that was kind of an alternative to level-class.

Jesse: City of Heroes has a weak-tie mechanic.

Mike: So what I would kill is questing. It robs us the ability to experience deeper, better narratives. Appeal for dynamic world.

Jesse: right, we should have dynamic worlds where lots of things can happen.

Nick: Let’s get rid of MMOs that present to each player the promise of being the hero.

Raph: the problem is just the weight of the conventions we’re importing from game to game, to the detriment of the form, some of which come from before digital media.

Jesse: that’s a problem with more than MMOs, all digital games have this issue.

[ME: I’m going to need to think about this panel and write something later. I think these guys are largely stuck chasing their own tails in some curious and unnecessary ways.]

Dan: So what should we be building?

Raph: Let’s make persistence more central, the dynamism of worlds more important.

Mike: yes, but persistence can take a lot of forms, can be just about identities and not about worlds.

Jesse: I think achievements are a really nice feature, can be even more of it, giving people more and more ways to be distinctive and individualized.

Dan: But achievements are almost a better, richer way to data-mine player experiences.

Trying to think about yesterday’s sessions before we get started. What is sticking with me is this:

1. No application, design or game can live up to the utopian imagination of potential users or players, and that utopian imagination is surprisingly resilient in the face of many disappointments. I’ve been writing a bit recently about a couple of notorious past cases of vaporware MMOs where players really expected everything and more from them: a sandbox, a mimetic mirror of the world, an instrument to reform real life, and more fun than a barrel full of monkeys. So I should know better to have those feelings myself by now. And yet, I really was struggling with deflated feelings as I messed around with Metaplace during and after Raph Koster’s keynote on it. Those feelings aren’t fair to Metaplace, which seems very interesting in many respects, and provides some fascinating points of contrast and comparison to Second Life in particular. But somehow I was expecting an authoring environment that would generate a wider variety of visual and narrative experiences for users and a wider range of implied invitations to possible creators. Maybe that has yet to come, because it’s still very early days for it. The thing for me now is to see it for what it is and what it was meant by its producers to be. Still, even in those terms, to go back to my post from yesterday, I was struck that Raph seemed to position Metaplace in terms of functions and purposes that are already strongly served or satisfied by existing tools and applications.

2. This morning, Doug Thomas is talking about the theme of “Plateau” for the conference, and in the magic circle and economies panel, I did feel that we’re at a point rather like that. But it makes it frustrating because it’s hard to move the conversation onward in a number of respects.

On Virtual Economies

Julian Dibbell’s introduction: maybe virtual economies were not so important, or not as important as we thought in the way that we thought they were. Maybe RMT doesn’t have to be quite the battleground that it was. Virtual economies don’t have to be radically autonomous to be richly interesting and playful.

Stephanie Rothenberg

Sweatshop education through reenactment in Second Life, film “Invisible Threads”

[Comment: the problem here is that the reality of MMO games trumps the polemical intent of their project, I think. Not the RMT sweatshops, but just think of pizza-making in The Sims Online, and how quick some players were to turn their leisure into a sweatshop-style operation. But I readily confess to a strong bias against serious games that are crafted as polemics–I think they’re an inefficient way to make a critique and end up reinforcing the image of left critique as cheerless (e.g., taking play and making play ‘serious’). Plus it’s hard not to end up as condescending towards the people you’re meaning to polemicize–they haven’t gotten our message yet, so we have to use a game! Not usually thoughtful as Bogost is about what makes a game persuasive, often just a translation of a polemical text into a mechanically simple game structure.]

Margaret Wallace, Rebel Monkey Properties

CampFu, casual teen-oriented game. Designer trying to talk about how they think about putting an economy into the gameplay.

[My thought: I’m really struck here at how unvarnished or undisguised the instrumentalism of design thinking about an economy here is: that it is designed to make players do something which is not the economy itself (“engagement”) is the word here, but not fun in and of itself. But what’s not clear to me, and Juho Hamari’s interesting work earlier in the meeting really seems to be saying interesting things on this subject, is whether they’re actually right about whether economic design is instrumentally effective.]

Andy Schneider, Live Gamer. New startup. Talking about RMT. Live Gamer proposed to integrate with an MMO rather that be outside of it, sort of a new covenant with developers. Average transaction size $45-50, greatest volume is Fridays. Live Gamer also works with GoPets’ secondary market: [ME: parents, lock up your credit cards.] [Schneider doesn’t really talk about the other big side of this, I think: the more the developer directly benefits from the cash value of items, the more you are tempted to design straight to that premise, so that cash differentially buys what in-game labor time now buys.

Ted Castronova

Fusion of real and virtual work spaces and labor value was inevitable; markets will seek more efficient solutions, less trouble, lower transaction costs.

We need to think about the policy and social consequences of the current state of economies in virtual worlds, however, to not merely let markets dictate this. Also argues it is in the self-interest of the game industry to be worried about the merging of the real and virtual; among other things, taxation will be extracted directly per transaction once the state is finally aware that this merger has happened. If it’s kept fuzzy, maybe the state’s presence or role can be kept fuzzy.

Need to actually make active decisions now, policies, not leave it to developers, create serious covenants between players.

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Curious exchange later: James Bower of Whyville.net described himself as training children for civic and political life through Whyville, and compared it to a Greek city-state. Knowing something about Greek city-states, I’m thinking this is a less wholesome comparison than he thinks. But Ted Castronova really pushed back on him, and noted that it’s an odd thing for someone in an autocratic position to be seeing themselves as preparing kids for democratic citizenship. Bower said, “Yeah, it’s a Greek city-state, and I’m Zeus”. Well, it’s an old metaphor with virtual worlds, actually, so not that odd.

“Breaking the Magic Circle”

We had a prior discussion at my table about whether there’s anything much left of use in “the magic circle” as a concept, and someone mentioned a recent discussion by Jesper Juul on the issue.

Jerry Paffendorf discusses the graphing of different kinds of online experiences at Metaverseroadmap.org, point of observing that the ways in which virtual world experiences spill out or become visible to some publics. He’s got a project for selling a square inch of land in Detroit, using them to link to virtual spaces. (Loveland)

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Alexander Macris, publisher & editorial director of The Escapist.

Use of achievement system within forums spurred a lot of forum participants to find ways to get badges, etc, how that makes participation (and incentives) on a forum very “game-like”, MMO type…so how MMOs are becoming a larger metapractice. How to make rock-paper-scissors more exciting–culmulative, competitive, contextual. “for our audience, what mattered more was what was outside the ‘game’ of badges, not inside of it–the external systems of recording etc.”

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Beth Coleman, media studies at MIT

“emergent design principles in X-reality design”
how design between virtual and real interact and iterate on each other
“if we’re moving toward ubiquitious computing, we need to move towards an experience of ubiquitious use”

Another claim in this case that 3d modeling makes controlling or commanding processes in the real world, but I find this one much more satisfying and intriguing, partly because it’s not a comprehensive claim, focused on particular (and highly spatial) kinds of physical work that requires complex two-way information flows.

More detailed paper on her arguments is available. Very interesting.
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Elizabeth Lawley
“tangible matters”
the tangibility of the virtual makes a difference.

Why are we at this conference, given that we could do it all online?
social capital needs to transfer across a magic circle to be valuable; can’t be tied up in a world

Liz argues that this is about inherent desire, that we have a need for materiality.

[One thought: I wonder how much of this point is getting tangled up in a difference between the ephemeral and the persistent, e.g., we value some objects not just because they’re material, graspable, touchable, but because they last. there are a lot of ‘tangible’ things which are very short-lived that we struggle to keep hold of, and a lot of tangible but ephemeral moments are also private, only something you remember: a view on a hike, a butterfly that crosses our path, etc.]

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Dennis Crowley, how game-logics spill out into the world. A lot like Thomas Malaby’s point about gas mileage and ludocapitalism. Mentions Feltron Reports, very interesting example. Once you start thinking of everyday life in ludic terms, and social software lets you make that something other than a private or idiosyncratic understanding, what happens to everyday life.

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[Another thought: as is often the case around these topics, I think people are overstating the novelty of making everyday tasks into something ludic, or creating a game-like feeling around accumulative or numerical tasks. Putting notches in a gun, etc. Heck, Gimli and Legolas playing “kill the orc”. This is a pretty old and elemental way to talk about repetition, accumulation, and so on. The difference here is the technologically-mediated collection of individual action and its reporting in systems of achievements, badges, placements into maps and spaces, and so on. The impact is not that something becomes playful suddenly that was not, but that you gain a sense of all other people playing a game; that the playfulness of tasks become transparent to all the people interested in or involved in the system. That cuts both ways, as you can see with WoW achievements. On one hand, it’s fascinating to find out what everyone else is doing in WoW, and what your practice is in relation to that; on the other hand, it becomes a driver of what people do, and the basis for a new and maybe unwanted system of social power.]

Government and governance in virtual worlds panel.

Tori Horton, description of how virtual worlds can link to public diplomacy, reviews weaknesses and strengths of virtual worlds for servicing public diplomacy.

My comment: same issue as with Raph’s framing of Metaplace, really. Why should we privilege or turn to virtual worlds for communicative purposes? What can we do more there that we can’t with other media forms or tools? (I think we can, but I feel like folks who are advocates of virtual worlds get pretty cagey about this point.) Either it’s about particular publics that are important or it’s about a way of communicating that has distinctive character, effects, etc. (which might include being indirect or diffuse in communicating)

Jean Miller, governance. When government agencies were interested in being in Second Life, why? What kinds of challenges did they face?

Me: in a way, this is kind of the story that’s now being told about Second Life as a quasi-postmortem: all the organizations and institutions that went into Second Life with an idea about what virtuality was and would do for them, and found difficulties, etc.–most of them are now absent from Second Life or very nearly so. I think this is where virtual worlds as an overall idea or media form are at this point now as a whole: they were oversold as the arrival of the Metaverse, the virtual world as replacement or overlay for the world. Instead, it’s just a media form, an interesting one, but it can’t do any of the things that were expected of it (or that were hyped about it).

Elizabeth Losh. Virtual state. Book, Virtualpolitik. Thinking about military video games, why and how do militaries choose to make games. Interested in how game developers come into the military institution, but points out that when people come to doing a game from the military side is in some ways more interesting. Looking at the way that Iraq specifically was represented in military games. Emergent play within several worlds, used to train but also for other purposes (therapy for PTSD, for example). Use of game to demonstrate or authenticate an existing project from government. Looking at repurposing of Second Life Iraq representations for artistic or political commentary.

William May, description of official thinking about use of virtual worlds within State Department, esp. Second Life, how they took an interest, what they thought they could do within Second Life that they couldn’t do otherwise. “It’s just another medium: it has to let us do something that we couldn’t do otherwise”.

Raph Koster, “A New Kind of World”, keynote

Focused on Metaplace.

Had to ban his own brother from UO. Brother is now cyberactivist. But virtual worlds don’t have that relevance, really. Nothing has happened in them that matters by comparison to what’s happening with Twitter, blogs, and so on. Virtual worlds aren’t really social media, despite our looking at them with such excitement.

Why do we assume virtual worlds are relevant, given how the incredibly relevant character of other new media, online tools, etc.? The thing is that other online media forms are largely open, individually autonomous, decentralized.

“Virtual worlds don’t really work this way”. Metaplace, he argues, is different. It’s open, designed to work with and be like the Web.

But what is the “killer app” for virtual worlds? It’s wasting time, having fun, escapism. Serious uses aren’t what they’re about.

The beginning of Raph’s answer: it involves placeness, persistence and avatars.