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A blogger I’m not familiar with is quoted on Massively today as proposing a “twist” (Massively’s words) on the subscription model whereby people pay for time rather than a flat-rate subscription.

It’s moments like this that I realize how long I’ve been involved in MMOs/MUDs/VWs. Paying for time is hardly a new idea. In fact, it was the billing model for MMOs/MUDs for a decade, until AOL went flat-rate in ‘96. Pretty much all commercial online games in the West charged by the minute, from games on closed services like AOL and Compuserve to games that ran banks of modems for you to dial into (so you paid both for telephone time and game time) to games running on the internet.

As soon as AOL went flat-rate it was almost impossible to charge by the minute anymore and, in fact, it was AOL’s decision to go monthly that led indirectly to me pioneering the virtual goods model with Achaea. I had been planning to bill by the minute but that was no longer acceptable to consumers and didn’t have the marketing budget or big IP to get people to whip out a credit card, so decided to try auctioning off some custom items in-game, and the rest is history.

The idea of billing for time is also not something that’s dead. Some MMOs do offer that as an option even today. For instance, Ragnarok Online lets you purchase game hours rather than using a subscription.

Would you be interested in paying by the hour rather than a monthly subscription? If so, how many hours/month do you think should be offered for $15?

I get unsolicited resumes for both Iron Realms and Sparkplay on a daily basis. The flow of them has increased in the last 6 months, and especially in the last 2. One letter today really upped the desperation level though. The market for job seekers is unfortunately grim presently.

“I can work 18 hours at maximum efficiency without food. I never take vacations or holidays, and I am available at all times - days, nights, and weekends.”

Yikes.

There’s this company called Seriosity. They produce some sort of software that integrates with MS Outlook to help you sort through your email more efficiently. Specifically, they have a virtual currency system using a currency they call Serios. They use their virtual currency like this:

1. Each user generates for himself a fixed amount of Serios per X time period. It’s equal for all users.
2. When you send an email, you can attach a certain amount of Serios to it.
3. Your email client can/will display the emails with the greatest number of Serios attached on top.
4. You keep the Serios attached to emails sent to you you (though presumably they’ll have to implement some sort of tax or other way to take currency out of the system as otherwise they’ll have massive inflation problems).

Essentially, then, they’re creating a currency of attention. The more emails you get, the more Serios you’re likely to get, giving you the ability to send more Serios to other people than you would be able to otherwise.

I’d never heard of this until today, when I got an email from an acquaintance (as he’s been outed now, it’s Associate Professor Edward Castronova…amusingly, he studies virtual stuff). He had sent an email to a lot of people he knew letting people know that from now on he’d be prioritizing whom he responded to by how many Serios were attached to the emails to him.

Here was my response:

“If I didn’t respect you and know that you mean well, I think my response to getting the email you sent would be to be a little pissed.
To be told that someone is going to delay answering my emails unless I attach some random virtual currency to it prompts a combination of incredulity and just general annoyance at the implication that getting an email from me isn’t important based on the content of the email and the recipient’s relationship with me. I don’t pay people I have relationships with to talk to me.

I have two active companies. I get and send as much email as anyone. This system would cause me to have to spend more time answering and sending emails than I do now. Why do I want to worry about how many Serios to allocate, and why would I permit the sender to determine how important an email is to me?

For instance, a random recruiter mails me. To him, it’s very important. I’ve gotten three emails previously that day from people just like him in other companies though. While I appreciate his point of view, from my point of view it ranks very low on the importance scale. Why would I want to permit him to determine what I prioritize my life around? I know what’s important to me. The sender does not.

Beyond that, the whole thing is just demeaning. Business is built on relationships as much as anything else. Seriosity is seriously mistaken if it thinks that people want to have to worry about ‘bidding’ to get the attention of business partners/employees/superiors. I find the idea of participating in it…yucky.

–matt, from the bottom of your inbox.”

So what do you think? Am I missing a bigger picture here? Is this something you’d want to participate in? I just can’t imagine spending the mental overhead on what amounts to a game that just gets in my way when I use email almost entirely as a business tool.

P.S. Have a look at the comments thread. They’re almost entirely negative.

P.P.S. There are a couple of threads on Terranova (both of whose comments sections are broken) started by Edward on this. In the first, he defended his decision to ignore people who aren’t using Serios. In the second, he decided that he did the big thing, apologized for offending people, and agreed that it was a mistake to try this.

I’m not so interested in when a book is released, so this is a list of the books I read in ‘08 that I enjoyed the most, regardless of when they were published.

1. “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” - Junot Diaz. Fiction. I rarely re-read books until at least a couple of years have passed, but I’ll almost certainly re-read this one in a few months. Mr. Diaz somehow manages to pack a book of epic scope, spanning multiple generations of Dominicans, in a few hundred pages. The humorous references to Star Wars, Tolkien, and comic books were a great counterpoint to the rest of the book, which is often somewhat dark. This won the Pulitzer for a reason.
2. “The World Without Us“- Alan Weisman. Non-fiction. A book that asks, “What would happen to the earth if humans disappeared tomorrow?” and uses the answers as a way to explore the impermanent (skyscrapers, roads, etc) and vastly more permanent (plastics, nuclear waste, etc) effects that we’ve had on the Earth. It also highlights what we’ve lost - forests filled with birdsong and reefs so thick with fish that vision is obscured. Examples of these may still be found but essentially only in places humanity does not occupy (such as Kingman Reef). I am rarely so happy as when I’m underwater scuba diving, freediving, or just snorkeling around on the surface, and I’ve seen firsthand how badly damaged most of the coral reefs near civilization are. It’s depressing. On the other hand, on a macro level, and ignoring the many species we’ve wiped out, we’re largely just ruining the Earth for ourselves since the Earth and the biosphere around it will recover from anything we can do to it (and then eventually perish when swallowed by our sun).
3. “The Forge of God” / “Anvil of the Stars” - Greg Bear. Fiction. This is an excellent duology. In Forge I find perhaps the most compelling and poignant end-of-the-world scenario I’ve ever read. It’s incredibly well-done. Anvil is the story of a few of the survivors of the Earth’s destruction seeking justice or revenge (which one is being sought is a key theme) on the alien race that destroyed our home. It’s epic sci-fi at its best. (No, I’m not obsessed with the world ending. It’s a coincidence that I happened to read this and The World Without Us both this year.)
4. “Altered Carbon” / “Broken Angels” / “Woken Furies” - Richard K. Morgan. Fiction. Pulp sci-fi/noir/cyberpunk at its best. Warning: Extreme violence and sex. And the most horrifying torture I’ve ever read or viewed. Despite that these are just an excellent, excellent read.
5. “The Last Tycoons - The Secret History of Lazard Freres & Co.” - William D. Cohan. Non-fiction. The definitive history of what was one of the iconic Wall Street banks and its so-called “Great Men,” particularly Felix Rohatyn, the greatest of their number and later U.S. Ambassador to France. Great book but only if you’re fairly interested in finance and the drama surrounding it. I read this at the beginning of the year, and am not sure how the general collapse of Wall Street affected them.

I don’t post most of our job openings here, but this one is a good opportunity to potentially break into design. You can find the job specs for this junior-level position here.

If you’re someone who loves the idea of designing content for MMOs (quests, NPCs, items, etc), are in the Bay Area or willing to move here, and want to work with people who came from companies like Valve, Blizzard, LucasArts, and of course Iron Realms, send your resume over. You can find instructions on our jobs page.

Gene Endrody penned a comment in my “Games Cannot Be Evil” thread that got sparked a brief thought. He wrote:

“In many MMO’s the premise is genocide if you take a step back and look at it from a high level. I think that’s more an accident of the grind mechanic and it’s not done with a great deal of gore in WOW. Visually it’s not hardcore; a typical teen rated game and I don’t think torture fits.”

I wonder: Is this kind of santized violence actually likely to be better or worse? Seeing the gore that comes from hacking someone apart is no doubt unpleasant, but could it be better for you to have to face the consequences of simulated murder than to be taught that killing can be turned into little more than a statistical exercise?

In real life, it’s the ability to perform sanitized violence that helps, psychologically, to let some people to kill great numbers of other people. Let’s use the example of America nuking Hiroshima, without worrying about whether it was a justified act or not. Could Americans, from the President on down, have stomached having to shoot 100,000 mainly innocent children, women, and men in the face, one by one? I’d suggest that except for some some outlying hardcore racists, very few Americans could tolerate watching that or even the idea that American soldiers were coldly lining up tens of thousands of kids and shooting them one by one.

They’re just as dead, of course, whether you line them up and shoot them or drop a big bomb on them, but the latter idea lets you deal with the violence more easily because it’s sanitized. Nobody can see the people dying, dropping a single bomb “feels” clean compared to shooting people in the face one by one since you never face your victims, and people have a tendency to depersonalize individuals when talking about them in large numbers.

I’m not sure which I’d rather have humanity experience in their virtual genocides: clean and sanitized, or graphic and “dirty”. I know which one sells better (most people don’t like being made uncomfortable) which is why Earth Eternal is a no-blood kind of game, but this is a very multi-faceted topic and I’ve got no idea what’s truly better. I distrust the “common wisdom” that would tell us that graphic/dirty is worse for us as a species, because I smell the Puritan ethic polluting the pond and obscuring the view, but I’m certainly not convinced that graphic/dirty is better for us either. I’m sure there are multiple axes that matter here and that the answer is not so simple as just picking one or the other (nevermind that it’s a grey-area continuum not a black&white binary choice).

I know I’m late to the game here, but I’ve recently started watching the reality series Survivor, and I’m addicted. The current season (not sure which one that is…16th maybe?) in Gabon is the first I’ve watched and I’m enjoying it far more than I thought I would. The gamesmanship is fascinating to watch, and I wonder if this show is popular with the rest of the gaming community or not.

Survivor melds together cooperative with competitive social play as well as I’ve ever seen done. Watching a group of five people come together to destroy the other four members of their tribe, all the while clearly plotting to betray each other, is a lot of fun. In the current season we’ve seen things like deals based on fake immunity idols, someone sent to “Exile Island” a record five consecutive times, and more. I’ve always felt that Diplomacy was one of the “purest” games, and Survivor ends up playing like a very elaborate version of it.

I’m enjoying this season so much, in fact, that we Netflix’d the first season of the game and started watching it tonight. It’s really interesting to watch how different the game was played in season 1. In most cases so far, it was barely addressed as a game at all by most of the participants. They’re more concerned with satisfying the fiction of the game - that you’re divided into tribes and that one needs to work first and foremost to make your tribe strong. By the season I’m watching though, the participants have long ceased to look at the experience as anything but a game, though that game dictates that they pretend they’re being genuine, regardless of whether it’s likely that their co-participants know they’re faking.

I like games where you are able to sort of redefine the landscape on which you’re playing midway through the game. Survivor feels somewhat like the equivalent of playing Quake where every player has an opportunity to, on the fly, rescuplt the dungeon/terrain that the game is being played on.

Raph has a post up explaining why, in his view, a torture minigame taken in isolation is evil, which he seems to believe quite strongly (even going so far as to invoke the Holocaust…).

I don’t buy it, at all. I’m a big opponent of torture in the real world, but I don’t believe that anything that lacks a will can be evil. A game cannot be evil any more than a book can any more than a cave painting can any more than the cave itself can be. Raph’s argument is that torture games (at least as he’s envisioning them) teach you to torture and thus is evil.

It may be bad game design, but bad game design isn’t evil any more than a poorly constructed chair that will fall apart when someone sits on it is evil, for evil only exists where there is a conscious intelligence making decisions. A game does what it’s programmed to do, and that’s all. It’s like calling the water that kills someone after a villain blows up a dam evil. The villain may be evil, but the water certainly is not.

If Raph can pull out over-the-top comparisons, so can I. History has had enough of people deciding that books, for instance, were evil and must be burned because they objected to the content within. Games are not and cannot be evil in and of themselves.

If you’re interested in this, I suggest diving into the comments section. The discussion there is much more interesting than the post itself.

Yep, I can’t deny it. 10 years ago when I pioneered the free-to-play w/ virtual asset sales business model (some call it the ‘microtransaction’ model, but I think that’s a misnomer) for MUDs/MMOs, I was criticized endlessly by some of the more excitable elements of the larger MUD/MMO community for it. I was loudly predicting on mud-dev (where most of the prominent developers discussed design years ago) and various MUD forums that everyone was going to end up selling virtual swords, but this has been slow to happen in the West.

Sure, the business model is completely dominant in Asia, but they invented it independently there. There are some huge successes in the West that use this model (like Habbo and Maple Story) but none that have really reached “gamer mainstream” status.

Until now. (Update: This could be a rumor, in which case pretend that you can see my smugness evaporating before your eyes.)

Ok, to be fair, the new Star Wars MMO isn’t a huge success yet. It is, however, being developed by Bioware, one of the greatest of the Western game developers, and published by EA, one of the two largest game publishers in the world. Regardless of whether it ends up being a runaway success, it’s really nice to see the highest profile (in the West at least) upcoming MMO, with probably the most experienced team, deciding to move away from the subscription model towards something that is more customer-friendly. (Don’t hate on me for saying that, haters. Free-to-play is simply more customer friendly in general, which may mean it’s not more friendly to the super-hardcore, such as those of you hating on me for pointing it out.)

No doubt most of you are aware of the recent decision in the Lori Drew case. I’ll summarize the case briefly:

• Lori Drew is a 49 year-old mother of a 13 year-old daughter, Sarah.
• Lori, Sarah, and a family friend conspired to create a MySpace account under the fake identity ‘Josh Evans.’
• They then used the MySpace account to communicate with a girl that Sarah hated - Megan Meier. They convinced her that this fake person, Josh Evans, was a fantastic boy and that he was very interested in her romantically, etc etc. Megan became extremely smitten with Josh.
• After a few weeks of this, Lori (as the fake Josh Evans) sent Megan a message telling Megan that the “world would be a better place without you.”
• Megan then committed suicide, telling “Josh” that “You’re the kind of boy a girl would kill herself over.”
• Prosecutors in Missouri, Megan and Lori’s home state, declined to file charges against Lori since they couldn’t find any laws she’d broken.
• In a move deemed highly unusual, federal prosecutors in California filed suit against Lori instead, on the grounds that the MySpace servers are located in California and thus they have jurisdiction.
• Lori was charged with multiple felonies, and was found innocent of the most serious one (conspiracy). The jury found her guilty on three counts relating to computer fraud (ie creating a fake identity), but reduced the felonies to misdemeanors. She could face up to 3 years in prison and a $300k in fines.

Now, there’s no doubt that Lori Drew is a loathsome, petty human being who deserves to be shunned, but I don’t believe she should have faced criminal charges for her acts or been convicted of computer fraud. This article in GigaOm sums up my objections well, and they boil down to a couple of ideas:

1. A corporation’s terms of service should not be conflated with criminal law. The idea that someone can be charged with criminal actions for breaking the terms of service of MySpace is fairly outrageous. At best, a civil action by MySpace is appropriate as it was their ‘contract’ that Lori Drew broke by creating a fake identity on its service. Remember: Lori was not convicted of contributing to Megan’s suicide. She was convicted purely for creating a fake identity that violated MySpace’s terms of service.
2. We must, must, must preserve the ability to operate anonymously on the internet. Hell, security experts regularly advise that children, in particular, lie about their personal details when registering on sites like MySpace. The verdict in this case seems to be telling us that anyone who lies about personal details when registering on any internet site that’s hosted in the US is guilty of a federal crime. I’d be surprised to find out that there’s a single person reading this blog who hasn’t falsified personal info during registration on one or more sites.

How does this relate to MMOs? Well, many/most MMO publishers would, from one angle, love be able to force their users to truthfully hand over their personal info when registering. If nothing else, it’d make linking the accounts of gold farmers and spammers together (and then banning them) much easier (though given that most of those are not from the US, this decision wouldn’t really have much practical effect). I’m also sure a lot of MMO players out there quiver in joy at the thought of another weapon (however ultimately ineffective) for the publisher of their favorite MMO to use against the spammers/farmers.

But seriously….do we really want federal charges being thrown at someone merely for violating the terms of service of an MMO, social network, or other site? Remember when you signed up for that extra gmail account and failed to provide your real details? Or when you were multi-boxing on WoW using your wife’s name and credit card? Welcome to your new life as a criminal!

Of course, it’s fair to assume that Lori wouldn’t have been charged with computer fraud had the case not been connected to Megan’s suicide. I doubt anyone reading this is using his/her falsely-registered Gmail account to break the heart of a little girl, but remember: Lori’s conviction doesn’t have anything directly to do with the suicide. She was convicted only on charges relating to computer fraud and violating the MySpace ToS - something every single person who ever provides false details when registering on MySpace (or almost any other site/service) does.

I don’t believe that what Lori did was a crime and I believe the decision should (and hopefully will) be overturned, regardless of how awful an individual Lori is.

Gamasutra speculates that the music and rhythm ‘fad’ in video games may be fading.

Purely anecdotally, it’s hard for me to disagree.  I was a huge Guitar Hero 1 & 2 fan, as evidenced in posts like this one. It’s difficult to overstate how enthusiastic I was about Guitar Hero 1 and 2 and I wouldn’t want to speculate on how many hours I spent playing them.

When Rock Band came out, I eagerly bought it and played it quite a bit, though less than Guitar Hero. I barely played Guitar Hero 3, and have only played Rock Band 2 a few times. I don’t think I’ll even be picking up Guitar Hero World Tour.

The trouble is just that these are all basically the same game, with endless new ‘levels’, and the thrill wears off after awhile, predictably, because the gameplay is fundamentally identical.

This is what can happen when you’re dependent on a platform controlled by someone else.

(Yes, of course, I understand the advantages of tapping into a large group of consumers someone else has already aggregated for you.)

The original Bloom County was and remains my favorite comic strip ever. Scott Kurtz over at PvPOnline apparently has quite a bit of fondness for it as well.

For the first time in my adult life.

Edit: But don’t get me started on California, which I’m ashamed of today.

Dan Miller has a post up talking about subscription vs. free-to-play, and concludes conclusively that one can make more money with free-to-play/virtual asset sales than with subscriptions. Raph referenced that post as well, stating that the graphs Dan includes in his post demonstrate why a microtransaction model ends up hitting a far larger market than a sub-based one. (’Microtransaction’ is not descriptive of the model though, as some games have some virtual goods for sale at prices that cannot be reasonably considered ‘micro’.)

Despite my obvious affection for virtual asset sales in a free-to-play model, I don’t think the decision to go free-to-play or subscription (or one of a myriad of other business models for MMOs) is that simple. It’s not purely about whether you’re reaching a larger audience and I don’t believe it’s a given that you’ll make more money, overall, with the free-to-play model. I think it’s largely dependent on the game you make and the audience that ends up developing for it.

Summary of Dan’s Post

Dan wrote, “To illustrate this point, I’ve prepared a couple of graphs. In both, the curved line represents the willingness-to-pay of the users. All the line says is that some people are willing to pay more for a game, while others will only pay less. The first figure depicts a hypothetical flat-fee subscription-based virtual world. I’ve indicated areas where revenues could be higher in two places. First, there are some potential players who simply find the game too costly: the flat-fee is greater than their willingness to pay for the game. Second, there are current players who are in fact willing to pay more for the game than they actually are, but since the game has a flat fee structure, there is no way to capture that untapped willingness-to-pay.”

Dan continued, “The second figure shows a hypothetical game based on RMT. In it, each player decides how much money he or she wants to spend in the game. Players who only want to pay the minimum can do so, while others can pay up to the maximum amount they are willing to spend. The result is that players end up paying much closer to their individual willingness-to-pay amount. It may not be a perfect match, but it comes much closer to the willingness-to-pay-curve than the flat-fee world.”

Dan finishes his post by  concluding that if you measure the blue area in the Free-to-Play graph (blue) and measure it against the red area in the Subscription graph (red), you’ll find that there’s more blue than red.

Why I Don’t Think It’s That Simple

I’m not an economist, so I have to apologize ahead of time for not speaking the lingua franca of that discipline. I’ve been using the virtual item sales model successfully for 11 years now though, and so can claim at least some expertise.

1. Positive feedback loops.Players become parts of communities, and there’s a friction to removing them from that community. Not all players, of course, are part of connected communities in MMOs, but many are and some of them want to play only subscription-based MMOs. The fact is, A free to play game cannot deliver exactly the same experience as a subscription game, and vice-versa. Just as there are actual reasons to prefer free-to-play games w/ virtual asset sales over subscription games that go beyond simply “how much you’re willing to spend”, there are actual reasons to prefer subscription games. Some people genuinely like the illusion of a level playing field. There are also certain negative social behaviors that tend to be magnified in a free-to-play game due to the fact that there’s a much lower barrier-to-entry to creating new accounts. You can design around them to some degree, but there you go changing the experience from a subscription game while doing so.

   So, when a community starts to explicitly prefer a certain type of game (say, subscription games) and developers develop MMOs specifically to serve that target market (Warhammer, AoC, etc) you’ve got a positive feedback loop that, from where I sit, ends up spinning off certain populations into what amounts to the equivalent of an ethnic ghetto. I don’t mean that in a negative way, but the similarities are striking. I’m constantly amazed at the number of blog posts I’ll read (including by people who should know better), for instance, that speak about the Western MMO market as if it’s composed only of WoW, Warhammer, AoC, EVE, and a couple of other games. There’s nothing wrong with preferring those retail, relatively hardcore games, but it really is a Balkanization of the full market for MMOs, which includes everything from kids playing Runescape and Maple Story to the super-hardcore population that plays EVE or even text MMOs.

   Point is, once these particular ‘tenets of faith’ develop there is a positive feedback loop. Imagine Mark Jacobs at EA Mythic announcing that Warhammer was going to be free-to-play starting tomorrow and that, further, they’d start selling gold for real money. How much of Warhammer’s audience would disappear? I don’t know, but it’s greater than 0, certainly, at least within that ethnic ghetto. The question then becomes whether you can gain a larger-enough audience that they’ll pay you enough to compensate.The very fact that the audience has a strong opinion about whether something is subscription or free-to-play makes the willingness-to-spend line variable.

2. It’s Not Just About Revenue.It’s about long-term profit and the ability to manage risk. Imagine a hypothetical game whereby the per-player operating costs were $1/month, but the average per-player revenue when it ran as a free-to-play game was $.90/month. (Maybe you have a million players, but they’re mostly in Malaysia and don’t have a lot of money.) One might very well experience a better outcome in that case by going subscription and weeding out the non-payers to raise your per-player revenue above the per-player cost.
3. Willingness to Spend is Affected by the Business Model. Earlier, I quoted Dan as writing, “Second, there are current players who are in fact willing to pay more for the game than they actually are, but since the game has a flat fee structure, there is no way to capture that untapped willingness-to-pay.” Giving something away for free devalues it to most people, to some extent or another. Charging for a box in Best Buy and piling a subscription on top of that gives off the message that, “We’re worth opening your wallet for.” Yes, I know, we’re all too smart to be affected by by that kind of crude messaging, etc etc. (We’re not, of course.)Once again, the willingness-to-spend curve for an individual player is not constant across different business models.

There are a whole pile of other nuances I’m not bringing up here and no doubt a lot that I haven’t yet learned, but what motivates people to spend a particular amount at a particular time is incredibly complicated and it’s important to examine your business model choices as carefully as a combat-focused MMO examines its combat system.

This is pretty cool. It’s a vest you wear that’s filled with pneumatic air capsules that “simulate” being hit by bullets or punches while you play a game. I realize it’s not for everyone, but I like the idea of feeling some pain when I’m shot/punched/stabbed/etc in a game. It’s one reason I like paintball but dislike laser tag. I’m not sure how strong this really is though, as the sales pitch does point out that, “The jacket won’t bruise you but you’ll certainly know you’ve been tagged.” Bummer!

Via Massively.

Yep. I will literally pay you $10,000 for referring us a great engineer that we hire (we being Sparkplay Media.) The big caveat is that he/she either be in or willing to move to the San Francisco area, as this is an in-office position.

Yes, it’s that hard to hire good engineers and time is important to us right now, and one of the interesting things about taking venture capital money is that speed gains a lot of importance compared to cost.

The specific positions we’re hiring for can be found on Sparkplay’s website. Broadly though, we’re looking for engineers who:

* Have extensive  C++ and/or server-side Java expertise.
* Have at least 2-3 years of experience in 3d games (compensation scales with experience, of course).
* Are into MMOs.

If you’re interested in finding out what our requirements are in more detail, please check out our jobs page.

If you’re referring someone to us, please email me directly at matt -at- sparkplaymedia -dot- com and include a resume as well as your contact information. Please also only send people who fit into one of the job categories on the jobs page.

Terms of the Offer:

If we hire an engineer you referred, we’ll pay you after the engineer has been employed by us for three consecutive months. I’ll edit this post when the offer expires.
Quick way to make $10k if you’ve got engineer friends that you think might like working on an MMO where the staff has complete creative control.

–matt

The man wasn’t wearing a flag pin during the debate tonight. What kind of patriot is that? That’s basically just one step away from burning our beloved flag. Kind of makes you wonder if the Vietnamese got to him all Manchurian Candidate-style. You know, weaken American by getting politicians to stop wearing little pins on their lapels. It’s been a long time since I read Gibbon, but I’m quite sure I remember him talking about how Julius Caesar himself predicted that Rome could not hold itself together without the leading citizens wearing little eagle pins on their togas. They didn’t do it and goddam if ole Julius didn’t turn out to be right. A mere 2000 years later, anyone whose been to Rome can see for themselves - traffic is awful! Sweet, sweet karma.

If you’re a good, patriotic American like me you have to be asking yourself: Can we afford a President who hates America so much he won’t even wear a flag pin to the first Presidential debate?

Scott Jennings has a post up about gold-farming and how to mitigate against it (since you can’t stop it). It’s generally a good read, and he references the work I’ve done at Iron Realms in setting up a dual-currency exchange back in the late 90s. (Those currency exchanges remain very popular features in our MUDs.) I’m not going to spell out the model again. I wrote about it previously in a somewhat comprehensive manner on Jeremy Liew’s blog.

I’ve always felt that the dual-currency model is a big deterrent to gold farming but as Iron Realms is a niche product we’ve never had to worry about professional gold farmers coming in to do their thing. The scale isn’t there. Scott appears to agree but goes further and suggests that gold farming can be stopped completely by ensuring that the only place to trade those two currencies is the in-game exchange. He writes,

“Allow players to place buy and sell orders freely, one for the other.

But -

• do not allow the players to know who is placing those buy and sell orders within the auction interface
• enforce through the game rules that the ONLY place to exchange RMT currency between characters is that auction interface

A blind auction. ENABLE the free market of in-game and RMT currency between the game’s players. But DISABLE the ability for players to assign an out-of-game worth to that currency, outside of your own storefront.”

At Iron Realms, we do the first but not the second. The auctions are blind but you can directly transfer credits (the currency that initially is purchased from us) to other players for a number of reasons, including that players actually use it as a currency with each other in some transactions rather than gold. Restricting the transfer of credits between players now would also upset a lot of players who would view their credits as worth less (and indeed they would be, since we’d have largely removed their utility as a currency).

At Sparkplay, we’re tentatively planning to restrict credit transfers as well as have the currency exchange (blind auction) that Iron Realms has, and I’m reasonably confident it will keep professional gold farmers out of the game. I firmly believe that gold farming isn’t the problem anyway - it’s the behavior of many of the pro gold farmers that’s the problem. Anyone throwing ‘morality’ out there as an indictment against gold farming is not to be taken seriously on the matter in my book, but it’s certainly legitimate to find being spammed with gold ads obnoxious as hell.

Scott writes:
“However, my belief - and this may well be false - is that enlightened self-interest does in fact work, and given the choice between patronizing other players and bad actors for RMT sales, players will patronize other players.”

I agree, but I think the reasons go beyond simply preferring other players to ‘bad actors.’ The fact is, a third party currency exchange is inherently risky if it’s not integrated with the publisher. You have no guarantee the transaction will be completed with a third party exchange. There’s no such thing as a reliable escrow service since the currency is ultimately under the control of the developer/publisher, not the currency seller (who has control over the currency only as long as the developer/publisher allows it). In an in-game exchange, the risk of a transaction not being fully consummated goes way, way down. Only a bug and unresponsive customer service combined can rob the buyer of what he paid for.

Beyond that, when a buyer of gold goes to a third party website to purchase gold with his credit card he’s handing over his credit card data to a company that is clearly willing to operate in the grey areas of the law. If you found a way to purchase gold with cold, hard cash you’d not have that worry but then, of course, you have no protection against simply never receiving the goods. You can’t claim your money back in case of being ripped off like you can with a credit card.

The in-game exchange solves all of those issues. It’s safe, it benefits all parties involved (the buyer, the seller, and the developer/publisher who created the world you’re in), and at the very least it seriously discourages professional gold farming.

The Untapped Resource
There’s another major force working against pro gold farmers in a game where it’s easy for any player to convert gold into a resource he cares about (not real-world dollars, but credits….if they’re playing the game and you’ve done your job properly as a dev, your players will value credits (or whatever you call your purchased currency) heavily. In a game like WoW where there is no legitimate way to exchange the product of time (gold) for the product of money (credits), there’s a huge untapped resource that, by virtue of the fact that it’s untapped, allows gold farmers to price gold at a price point where it’s profitable to operate in countries with low wages (China, etc).

With a currency exchange in your game you, the developer, have just created an easy way for every single player in the game with more time than money to add his or her disposable gold to the market. In other words, all that excess gold that many ‘normal’ players have is suddenly accessible to the market. Econ 101 folks: What happens when supply goes up? Price goes down. When price goes down, it’s less profitable to operate a gold farming operation and making it unprofitable for gold farmers to operate is the only way to stop them.

Caveats
I say that it seriously discourages professional gold farming rather than preventing it outright because, well, people are tricky and as the whole capitalist world is finding out right now, there are no reliable experts when it comes to human behavior writ at a large scale. In a game with a currency exchange and no ability to transfer the ‘hard’ currency (credits in the case of Iron Realms), it’s still possible to farm gold and sell it for real money. The real question is: Will the real cost of buying gold out of the game be lower than the cost in-game?

The real cost here has to include the perceived risk and friction costs of buying from a third party. If you can get your playerbase to understand that they’re potentially increasing the risk of being a victim of identity theft when they buy from some shady (I’m not sure there are other kinds) gold seller, you actually do raise the cost of buying in a third party market. Likewise with highlighting the risk of being ripped off if you buy from a third-party or the risk of being banned for violating your game’s rules against paying real dollars (as opposed to ‘credits’ or the equivalent thereof).

I am not an economist (and economists aren’t very good at seeing even a short way into the future), but I think that if you have enough scale to have pro gold farmers trying to sell gold on their own sites to you, you also have enough scale to see people arbitraging between the external and internal markets, which will bring the prices into balance. When the prices are in balance, the costs are not since the extra risks of being ripped off out-of-game raise the true cost above the price determined by the in-game market. I put this under the Caveats section because my caveat here is that this is purely theoretical. Iron Realms doesn’t have the scale to properly test this. Sparkplay will, however.

Example arbitrage opportunity:

1. Goldsellers Inc. employees a bunch of ambitious, hard-working young Chinese or Malays or whatever. They earn gold for Goldsellers Inc. at a rate faster than almost any of your ‘normal’ players can.
2. On the in-game currency exchange, credits are going for 1000 gold each (sounds like an absurd amount to a WoW player I know, but the numbers themselves are arbitrary here).
3. Credits cost $1 each. (It’s not really this simple in the model we use, as credits cost varying amounts depending on how many you buy from us at one time. The difference in price/credit between the biggest and smallest batches you can buy is almost double. That really complicates this example, so let’s just ignore that facet for the sake of this.)
4. Goldsellers decides to try pegging its sale price to the in-game price, and sells gold on its website in 1000 gold chunks, at $1/chunk. (Note that this assumes there is any price they can sell gold at that’s profitable given that the in-game exchange has lowered prices for gold beyond where they’d be if the internal market didn’t exist.)
5. Nobody buys from Goldsellers since they trust the publisher/developer more and find it easier to simply buy credits from the dev/publisher and then use those to buy gold. No risk of being banned this way, no risk of being ripped off, etc. (This assumes your players trust your service. If they don’t, you’re probably fucked anyway.)
6. Goldsellers lowers its price and finds that it gets a bit of traction. Say that it finds that it can manage to sell 1000 gold for 90 cents. (again, the actual numbers here are arbitrary. The point is that this number is less than the $1 that a credit costs you on the internal market, with that one credit able to purchase 1000 gold)
7. Mr. Arbitrage steps in, looks around and sees a classic arbitrage opportunity here. He buys Goldsellers entire existing inventory of gold.
8. Mr. Arbitrage takes that gold and sells it on the in-game exchange at 1 credit for 1050 gold (rather than 1 credit for 1000 gold) to ensure he can unload his inventory  Point is, now the price of gold on the exchange is, temporarily at least, lower than $1 for 1000 (since $1 in credits now gets you 1050 gold rather than 1000 gold). Goldsellers previously found that they needed to discount by 10% in order to get people to use their site instead of the in-game exchange. If the new price on the exchange is lower than $1, they will have to lower their own price as well. Since credits (what you purchase with gold on the internal exchange) can only be used in-game there is, of course, a soft ceiling after which point credits don’t become worth that much to an individual player (once you’ve exhausted all you can buy, the value of non-tradeable credits decreases drastically for you personally). Happily, you’ll have a lot of players willing to do this. The friction costs of the transactions are the only things that will stop the prices from being driven to the point where they are effectively precisely the same.
9. Inevitably, the external market will be driven down by this method just as the internal market is, until the price on the internal exchange effectively recognizes the supply that exists both on the internal exchange and the 3rd party websites, or something approximating that. It seems to me that it’s virtually impossible for the external market to survive in these conditions.

I’m unsure whether this type of arbitrage would be more or less effective with tradeable credits. If you allow players to trade credits outside of the internal exchange, then it literally only takes a single organized person/group performing arbitrage to equalize the markets and stuff it to the pro gold farmers, since said person/group could just sell those credits to other players for real cash (granted, on a third-party site, which repeats many of the above problems involved transaction risk for the buyer) and thus there’s no real ceiling to an individual’s potential demand for credits.

Six months ago or so I read Richard K. Morgan’s sci-fi Takeshi Kovacs trilogy, consisting of Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies. It’s absolutely excellent, and I highly recommend it. He’s an extremely visceral writer, and certain intense scenes from the books are almost burned into my memory.

One convention of the books is that people are able to enter various Matrix-like private virtual worlds (there’s no universal, single, ubiquitous world). People are also able to trap others there, and accelerate or decelerate the perception of time while in these virtual states. The result of this is that it’s possible to torture people in horrifying ways, and simply ‘resurrect’ them virtually if they die in the simulation. The person experiences all of the pain and horror, but his suffering isn’t bound either by time or by corporeal death. He can be tortured to death over and over and over, and it can all happen in the space of hours.

I tend to be a fairly pro-progress person. More knowledge, more understanding, more invention. The risk of nuclear holocaust was worth the knowledge gained from understanding what lay below the level of the atom (at least in the present insofar as we haven’t blown the world up). I’m not a religious person, but the idea of the Christian hell, whereby there appears to be no salvation - suffering for a billion trillion years for the mistakes of a few dozen - is terrible. Were we to develop virtual worlds to the point where we could truly control the experience for the user, and create a world of our choosing for him (holodeck, etc), we’d also be creating the ability to insert someone into a literal hell, virtual or not.

I guess my point is just that even as someone who is so pro-progress there are consequences that are so terrible and so unthinkable that no advancement is worth them. We’re a long way from any possibility of a virtual hell, of course, but the whole idea of some sort of moral midget being able to torture someone in a way that the victim perceives as being nearly perpetual and inescapable is so awful that nothing is worth that possibility. There’s almost no conceivable advance I can think of that would justify creating the possibility of that kind of suffering, even on an individual level.

Virtual worlds (by which I mean anything from a text MUD to WoW to Second Life to Google Lively) clearly rock, and inevitably, what we’re all hoping for is something that approximates the holodeck. Is it worth the consequences though, in terms of the ability to impose suffering, regardless of how many people gain however much pleasure from living out their sexual fantasies in a disease-free way (and whatever other relatively minor users humanity ends up using a holodeck for)? The ability to decouple perception (pain, pleasure, or whatever else) from time would be such a terrible weapon that I think not.

Just late-night ramblings, of course.

Mark Jacobs, in making a case for why people should play WAR instead of WoW writes, “Also, you come if you’re tired of “WoW” — and it’s not that there’s anything wrong with “WoW.” All online games have a lifespan. That’s just a fact, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re “Ultima Online” or you’re “EverQuest” or you’re “Dark Age of Camelot” or you’re “WoW” — none of these games are going to last forever.”

On the one hand, of course, he’s right, literally. Nothing will last forever, including our very own planet. On the other hand, I don’t really think he’s talking in billions-of-years terms. Of course, given that the longest continuously operating MMO (the text MMO Gemstone, from Simutronics) is on its 21st year of existence and that even UO is 11 years old and still happily alive (and profitable), it’s a bit odd to assert that WoW’s life over the next few years is anything but nearly-assured.

So yeah, WoW won’t live forever, but it’s only been 4 years since its release, and I’ve seen no evidence at all that the population of WoW is dying, or even decreasing. A huge expansion for it is coming out soon and it appears to be at the height of its health so far (I say so far because WoW has managed to almost continually grow since the day of release). Certainly, at some point it won’t be the dominant MMO in the West anymore, but that day isn’t tomorrow, and the day when it’s no longer around is not next year and possibly (who knows?) not even next decade.

There’s a wealth of media coming up that I’m looking forward to, and it feels like a joyful consolation for summer moving towards a close (though it stays summery here until mid to late October typically). In no particular order:

• Real Time With Bill Mahrer. It’s awesome that his first night back is tomorrow night, the night after the DNC ends.
• Mercenaries 2 (it came out a couple of days ago, but I haven’t got it yet)
• Entourage
• Heroes
• Viva Pinata 2. I was ranked around #35 globally in the first one, though I don’t think I’m going to have the time to compete with all the 12 year old girls. Nevertheless, I’m going to fill my garden with Sparrowmints, Chewnicorns and Dragonaches (or their Viva Pinata 2 equivalents) running/flying around being generally adorable. Then I’ll head outside and work on my actual garden which, while not quite as colorful, is still fairly charming.
• Spore
• True Blood (though I’m hesitant about this one. HBO’s record lately has not been great with new shows. I still want the three hours back that I spent watching three hours of “John from Cincinnati”)
• Californication. I almost feel guilty for liking this show so much as it’s fairly gratuitous, but it’s fun.
• The Office
• The Force Unleashed
• I WAS looking forward to the next Harry Potter movie (I recently watched them all for the first time) but of course that’s not happening for awhile now.
• Lego Batman
• Appaloosa. Ed Harris, Aragorn, and Jeremy Irons, in a Western! They’re all great to watch.
• The rest of the season of Mad Men and Weeds.

Seriously! Aliens are trying to steal your WoW account.

I love this. One of our environmental artists at Sparkplay got married recently and he and his girlfriend decided to create a videogame themed-wedding. They entered the outdoor wedding to the Halo theme, their cake involved Han, Leia, and Ewoks, and each table was themed after a different game, with each guest getting a unique placard with a video game character on the front and bio of the character on the back (they were Master Chief and Cortana). Guests even got some videogame-themed cookies to take home.

Congrats, Ben and Jillian!

Some of the pictures below!

I lost most of my respect for Bill Clinton quite awhile ago, but the speech he gave tonight at the Democratic National Convention, following on Hillary’s excellent speech last night, was awesome and he earned some of it back very quickly.

By nature, I’m not really a “joiner.” I dislike political parties, and have major reservations about our political systems in general, but I’ll tell you what: It’s time to take the White House back from the incompetent, corrupt lunatics that have been such a disaster for the last 8 years. Bush is a traitor to most of the ideals that America was founded upon (if never acted close to perfectly upon), and McCain appears to back most of what he’s done. All signs point to a McCain administration looking a lot like a Bush adminstration: Driven by misplaced idealism rather than pragmatism, incompetent in practice, and terrible for both America and the world at large.

Go Barack Obama!

Star Wars has a long history in the MMO genre. I’m not actually sure what the first Star Wars MMO was, but there were/are multiple Star Wars-themed text-based MMOs (also called MUDs for those of you just tuning in) going back to the early 90s. In 2003, of course, Star Wars: Galaxies was released and earlier this year Bioware confirmed what everyone already knew: It’s working on a Knights of the Old Republic MMO.

But what’s this? The Hamburgler got the jump on everyone and stuffed Star Wars into the month-old McDonalds virtual world, with, of course, a tie-in to Happy Meals (get a character and a code in a Happy Meal and unlock it inside the virtual world).

There’s lots to be said (and no doubt others will say it) about the way in which brands are best-used in virtual worlds. Is it better to start your own or infiltrate other worlds? Probably depends on the size of your brand. With a brand the size of Star Wars, and with its reasonably wide-appeal (as compared with something more narrowly focused in terms of demographics like Bratz or Barbie), why not run multiple MMOs and stick your lightsaber into other people’s virtual worlds (provided those virtual worlds aren’t tarnishing your brand with flying penises and simulated paedophilia, of course)?
It does sadden me a little to think that children out there is being assaulted by the happy yellow brainwashing that Ronald dishes out, particularly with childhood obesity and diabetes on the rise. Fast food sucks.

“In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.” - John McCain.
Just the kind of guy this country needs as its next President: Someone either so senile he forgets that his own nation has already invaded two countries in the 21st century, or someone so hypocritically arrogant as to believe that such statements shouldn’t apply to America.

Massively posted a question asking what IP and what developers people would love to see team up together. Scanning the initial answers in the thread, most are what you’d expect: stuff like Mechwarrior (awesome), GI Joe (lame), Dragonriders of Pern (probably awesome, but I’m not a personal fan). My favorite suggestion is definitely that Raph develop GI Joe. Picturing that makes me chuckle.

I’ll join in the game, as well. One of my favorite books ever is “The Story of Philosophy” by Will Durant. It’s a fantastic property for an MMO. Play as a disciple of one of the great philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, Bacon (no, not Kevin), Spinoza, Voltaire, Kant, Schopenhauer, Spencer, and Nietzsche. The spells and abilities practically write themselves! Just imagine….

Meditate in the Cave of Plato and Pierce the Veil!

Join the order of Aristotle and unleash your Boredom skill tree, incapacitating your enemies with mind-numbing treatises on pretty much any subject known to man!

Become a follower of Kant and warp reality with your Epistemological Blast!

Join forces with Nietzsche to unleash your inner Ubermensch!

Follow the footsteps of Voltaire with your Flame of Heresy and fight for the Light of Thought against the evil Church!

Succumb to the pessimism of Schopenhauer and discover the power of the Will Unparalleled!

There’d be no leveling, of course, as none of the philosophical orders could agree on either what to measure, whether it’s possible to measure it, or indeed whether whatever one proposes measuring even exists. There wouldn’t be much loot, but there’d be some awesome PvP, enacted largely via deploying pamphlets accusing the other philosophical orders/guilds of being vacuous and sophomoric. The best part is that since each operates within its own frame of reference, this is a PvP game where everyone can win, since each order’s definition of win differs!
There’d also be raids, of course, and some would be extremely difficult to complete. For instance, I’d imagine that the Caves of the Critique of Pure Reason (200 man raid) would require a whole lot of attunement quests ahead of time, lest the psyches of unprepared adventurers be shattered by the horrors found within, foremost the Shade of Kant, who has been known to one-shot unlucky adventurers with his Sustained Beam of Universal Law or the terrible AoE spell, A Priori Reasoning.

Heady stuff. If any dev teams are interested in taking this idea further, let me know. I’d say that this game is probably perfect for a tween or teen audience, so I’d probably nominate Jagex (Runescape devs) for it, though I’d be happy to talk a call from Blizzard too. Ring me up, Rob Pardo, when you’re tired of working on Deathknights and Lich Kings.

Not happening anytime soon, of course, but this is surely the next best thing.

In brief: It’s an add-on to the Wiimote that will allow for nearly 1:1 motion. Sword/lightsaber fighting ahoy! Despite my general lack of excitement over the Wii, this announcement has definitely perked me up regarding the little white box.

“I’ve played a Nintendo Wii. I don’t see it as a competitor. It’s more of an expensive niche game device.” - Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony

I don’t actually like the Wii from the perspective of myself as a games player, but that’s not because I’m too mainstream for it or whatnot. I’m more of a 360/PS3/PC gaming guy because I’m into hardcore niches (Rock Band and my most-unmanly love of Viva Pinata aside). Takes some odd logic to portray the console that’s outsold the PS3 by a margin of about 2.3:1 as the niche option of the two.

Runescape, arguably the most popular MMORPG in the Western world, launched probably the largest single update in its venerable existence today, overhauling the website and launching a new high-detail visual mode that shows off the fact that Jagex has updated effectively every asset in the game. They’ve also added a much-desired full-screen mode and chosen this time to announce that prices for new subscribers will be going up starting in August (30p increase for UK users, 95 cent increase for US users). I’ve included a shot of the updated Runescape below (taken from a forum dweller….I wasn’t able to get in with my trusty character Dreampie due to server difficulties.)

It’ll be interesting to see if this boosts Runescape’s user numbers or not over the next few months.

Click here to see a shot of the new Runescape look.

Great post here by Raph, countering some claims by some newer developers that MMOs don’t owe as much to text MUDs as most of us might suggest. Raph says it, but I’ll repeat: Graphical MMOs are generally a step (or multiple steps) backwards in terms of features when compared to the best text MUDs. That’s not to say graphical MMOs are not also awesome, but they do trade eye candy for gameplay in many cases.

Today, as California enters into the modern age by recognizing marriage between a man and a man or a woman and a woman, I find myself quite proud of it. Go California.

I know I haven’t posted at all lately and shame on me for popping my head out of a rock to post a self-congratulatory message about an Iron Realms game, but I’m going to do it anyway. It’s fairly rare for gaming magazines/sites to pay any attention to the continued existence of text MUDs so we were thrilled when a UK print magazine called Total PC Gaming called Achaea the top MUD in the world (second was Discworld MUD and third was Wheel of Time MUD). There’s no online link to point you to, unfortunately, as they don’t seem to publish their issues online in a comprehensive way. Congrats to everyone who’s had anything to do with Achaea over the last 11 years and especially to the current team running it, led by Maya and Clementius. Damn good job.

I’ll try to post more often, though no promises. Things are going very well at Sparkplay, and we’re up to 13 people plus various contractors now. If you’re interested in seeing where we’re at with Earth Eternal, take a look at this screenshot of some of the development team in-game.

Silicon Alley Insider is attempting to rank the most valuable private web companies in the world. The list is of note to this blog largely because it contains a number of entries that are MMO/Virtual World-based. (of course, please note that as these are private companies and as Silicon Alley Insider has no privileged access to their financials valuing these companies is really nothing more than a somewhat educated guess).

Facebook tops the list, of course (though at $9 billion rather than the $15 billion valuation Microsoft invested in), but Webkinz is #7, Habbo is #9, Linden Lab is #11, and Stardoll is #17. Bafflingly missing is Runescape/Jagex, which it seems to me should be somewhere around where Habbo is.

Ok, maybe not  the best (I put freerice  in the top slot as it actually accomplishes something) but I think September 12th is one the best so-called ’serious’ games I’ve played, despite its claim that it’s not a game. The mechanics are dead-simple and the game doesn’t need a bunch of explanation to illustrate the point its making. Good stuff.

I’m not going to insult anyone’s intelligence by explaining any further. Just check it out! (It’ll only take a minute of your time or so.)

We (Sparkplay Media) are looking for someone for an office manager and assistant to me, basically. What I want is someone who is really enthusiastic about games, who has general administrative experience and wants to spend a couple years working as part of the team, keeping the office functioning generally and helping to remove administrative work from my plate.

You’ll get a chance to involve yourself in game development as far as your abilities go and time allows, and if you’re relatively untrained we’ll help you learn how to help. Once we think you’re ready, you can train a replacement and move full-time into whatever aspect of game development you showed the most promise at if that’s what you’d like. No game development experience is necessary for this position (though having it is certainly not a negative).

This would, obviously, be an on-site position at our offices in North Beach, in San Francisco. Pay would depend on what experience and skills you bring to the table, but will be reasonably competitive.

The important thing to us is that whoever fills this position is just a very multi-functional person capable of being reliable and who is self-motivated. We want you to look for responsibility to take on and stretch yourself, and, of course, be a cheerleader for Sparkplay.

I’m posting it here rather than on our website first as there may be people out there who vaguely know me through the blog that are interested. Please feel free to refer anyone you think is a good fit too.

Responsibilities:

• Provide administrative support to the CEO (me) and others as needed, ranging from scheduling travel to booking meetings to light market research to putting together Powerpoint presentations.
• Keep the physical office running – order office supplies as needed, coordinate deliveries and repairmen, etc
• Handle general administrative duties – faxing, filing, organizing, and so on.
• Assist in the processing of hiring, benefits and termination packets.
• Answer the phone.
• Help out with whatever game development you can as a secondary priority.
• Just generally do what you can to help the entire team that you’re part of kick some butt.

Requirements:

• 2+ years experience administrative work (office manager, administrative assistant, etc)
• High school diploma or G.E.D.; BA degree preferred.
• Excellent skills in Word, Excel, Powerpoint. Ability and willingness to learn new software packages.
• General knowledge of office equipment.
• Record of stable employment. At least two years in your previous position.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills.
• Good judgment; ability to work independently and as part of a team.
• Bonus: Better-than-novice Dreamweaver skills (so you can do some very light website updates)
• Bonus: Game development experience (either amateur or professional)

You need to be legally qualified to work in the US for this position.

If you’re interested send me an email directly to matt (-at-) sparkplaymedia (-dot-) com. To show you’re paying attention, include the word “platypus” in the subject line!

This cracks me up.

Antigua, a small Caribbean country, is threatening to make piracy of IP owned by US-based owners legal, and it apparently has WTO backing to do so. The US, in impressive hypocrisy, outlawed international online gambling, while keeping domestic online horse race betting legal. The WTO ruled that this kind of naked protectionism was illegal and Antigua claims it will make moves towards turning piracy into legal sharing in the case of US IP.

I’m not sure this sort of situation (which could lead to very accessible servers full of movies, music, etc that couldn’t be shut down by the US government without resorting to force) is inevitable but I’m a fan of the little guy telling the bully on the block to go stick it. The consequences of that situation arising really highlights the importance of providing a service (far more expensive/difficult to duplicate than IP is) rather than just a product, though of course anyone making MUDs/MMOs or any other game with a critical server component already knew that.

Update: A commenter points out that the WTO ruling caps the amount of damage Antigua can do at $21 million, which makes for a far less interesting situation.

(Via PlayNoEvil)

Sparkplay is hiring. (For Senior Designer, Senior Software Engineer, and Software Engineer. More positions coming later.)

JOKING! (and who got put on what card was mainly random)

But still, kind of funny: (bottom, second from the right is me). I guess if I had to be a card and couldn’t be the Ace of Spades or one of the Jokers, King of Hearts isn’t too bad. I feel a bit bad for those who got stuck on the threes and fours.

Woot! Just finished it, and it only took a month and a half, with a recorded play time of about 19 hours (probably 25-50% more if you consider all the dying I did in the early to mid stages of the game).

One of the best games I’ve played in a long time. Minireview: Loved the story, loved the conversation mechanic, loved the ‘world’ backstory, enjoyed the combat, hated the inventory management. 9.4/10

I don’t know him well enough to call him a friend, but Scott Jennings and I certainly share a similar enough outlook on many parts of life for me to consider him a friend-in-waiting. His blog, of course, is at www.brokentoys.org.

Scott’s got a problem currently. He lives in America, and has been operating under the understandable assumption that freedom of speech lives on, for the most part. Sadly, not everyone feels that way.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s that GDC time of the year again, and for those interested, I’m running roundtables on virtual goods with Dan James again, like the last two years, and will be on a panel about raising venture financing with a bunch of good folks. You can find a link to the descriptions of the roundtables and panel here. Hope to see some familiar faces and some new faces!

We (Sparkplay Media) announced today that we closed on a $4.25 million Series A round from Redpoint Ventures and Prism Ventureworks.

Closing this investment round has been both exciting and, to be frank, a bit scary. There was definitely a bit of giddiness on my part when I first saw the money hit our ban account, supplanted within 12 hours by a sense of crushing responsibility. I’ve certainly never seen that much money in one place before, much less under my control.

I’m not going to talk in detail about the process but three things about raising VC money stuck out to me:

1. Everybody warned me that raising a Series A would be a full-time job. They’re dirty liars. It’s two or three full-time jobs, encompassing every single waking moment for months straight. Endless meetings, endless documentation/presentation re-writes. I’m sure it’s easier if you’ve done it before and are a known quantity, or if you have a major league reputation, but I don’t fall into either of those categories.
2. Before deciding to raise VC money, my view of them generally was along the “vulture capital” line. I was prepared to really be put through the ringer and find myself getting screwed at every turn. These are guys who control immense amounts of investment money and I was expecting that a lot of VCs would be cynical, dismissive people whom I had to kind of hold my nose to deal with. The reality was literally the opposite. I think out of all the VCs we met, there was only one that I actively didn’t like. Almost all of the ones I met with (which is probably not a representative slice, as we took a fairly targeted approach to fundraising) were very sharp, genuinely interested in what we were doing, and showed no sign of trying to force us into any kind of deal that was untoward or bad for us. I really liked almost every VC I met, which makes sense I suppose: Their job is to attract good entrepreneurs and they’d quickly cease to do so if they acted like the jackasses some people make them out to be.
3. Our plans morphed a fair amount between deciding to raise VC money and actually doing so. These guys are really good at forcing you to think through exactly what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Even VCs we didn’t end up taking money from contributed in this way.

It came down to choosing between two deals for us (each with a syndicate of two VC firms), which was a great position to be in, though it was much harder than I had anticipated to turn investors down. By the time you’re offered a term sheet, you’ve probably gotten to know your potential investors a bit and feel a bit of a personal bond with them (at least I did).

We’re extremely happy to have chosen the investors we did (there were no bad choices between the two deals on the table at the end of the process…only a great deal and a slightly greater deal). As a bonus, one of our board members (Fouad ElNaggar from Redpoint) is a Rock Band god. His band, “the Red Stained Lips” is currently ranked in the top 10 worldwide (though has been as high as #2 I believe). Serious gaming cred!

(In case they are reading this, so that they don’t feel left out, I want to thank Scott Raney@Redpoint, and Will Kohler and Bong Koh from Prism as well. You guys rock, just not as literally as Fouad!)

Imre Jerle, the content boss for Jagex (developer of the massive hit Runescape), tells us, in an interview with Eurogamer, that engaging in RMT (buying in-game currency like gold with real money) is the equivalent of hiring prostitutes. In his words, “It’s not necessarily the prostitution which is a problem, although you might have moral problems with it. The real problem is the organised crime that’s built around prostitution; the human trafficking, the drugs, etc.”

He’s completely right, just not in the way he believes. It is indeed all of the crime that surrounds prostitution that’s the problem with it, but the reason that the crime in question exists is because prostitution is illegal. Similarly, RMT is only a problem when the game company bans it. How do I know? Iron Realms has had legalized RMT for a decade, with in-game systems to facilitate it. Its MUDs have had exactly none of the problems associated with RMT in games where the operator has banned it. How about Puzzle Pirates (which also has legalized RMT and in-game systems to facilitate it). Any RMT problems there? Nope.

The problem isn’t RMT, the problem is trying to outlaw an activity people want to do. You can, of course, object to the activity itself (as some people do with both prostitution and RMT) but the “crime” surrounding the activity is entirely a result of trying to dam the flow of demand. Permit me to engage in an analogy:

You build a dam, and the water builds up but the dam is only so high. Since you believe that absolutely no water should be let through the dam based on some sort of weird moral objection, you dogmatically refuse to try and channel the water, believing that you can simply stop it from flowing forever. Of course, you cannot, and eventually either the dam explodes or the water finds other ways out of the reservoir. The trouble is that you’ve just lost control of the water and thousands of poor farming folk in nearby farming villages have perished as a result. If only you had acted responsibly and channeled the water rather than simply pretending you could dam the river forever, Farmer Joe and his seven kids would still be alive.

This is possibly inappropriate for my blog “about games”, but that’s never stopped me before. I wrote about my dad in a post about the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution against the Soviets a bit over a year ago. It’s perhaps a small thing by some people’s standards but it makes me proud to see my dad’s local newspaper write an article about a medal he recently received from the Hungarian service for his selfless service in the cause of freedom from Soviet oppression during the Revolution. Article is here.

Fuck tyrants, no matter what flag or god they cloak themselves with.

I wrote a guest post for Jeremy Liew (a really sharp venture capitalist) over on his blog about using dual currencies to unlock the demand of non-paying players in a virtual goods business model. Check it out. (His blog is worth reading and I’ve finally updated my blogroll to include his.)

Three people have pointed me at this article on Techcrunch today.

It’s about a “passively” multiplayer game played on the web’s network of sites and links between them, called PMOG (in closed alpha as of this posting). In it, users create missions/quests for each other involving going to certain websites and can leave mines for each other on specific sites. So, for instance, I might leave a mine for you on Google and if you point your browser there you get hit. Details are a bit sparse, but the root of the idea is to use the web as a map on which to anchor gameplay mechanics, and to use navigating from site to site as the verb that drives everything.

I’ve had more than one conversation in the past about ideas that use the web’s topology to drive gameplay but I was unable to come up with anything that felt really compelling. I think that there’s a potential in the core idea to create something incredibly viral and sublime, but the details of that idea have always remained on the tip of my tongue, so to speak. I’m greatly looking forward to seeing what Justin Hall and his team does with PMOG. If they can make this work I think they’re in danger of defining an entirely new genre of game. I hope they nail it.

Last night I had a dream. I was throwing a ball around with some people in a swimming pool and someone suggested we play a game of water polo (I’m half Hungarian, so it’s in my blood…weird that a land-locked country would have such a history of obsession with water polo). An argument thus arose over whether imposition of rules would detract from the fun we were having or not.

In my dream, we decided to continue with the unstructured play rather than transition into a game with formal rules. That’s what we explicitly decided on, at least. In my dream-reality, however, what I realized (in retrospect) we decided on was to simply keep the status quo in terms of our understanding of the implicit rules in what we were doing. For instance, clearly it’d be against the implicit rules of behavior we were operating under to just toss the ball in the air repeatedly (playing catch with yourself). We’d be annoyed if someone violated that rule.

In other words, it wasn’t a choice between structured and unstructured play: There is no such thing as unstructured play. There’s always a structure involved in play, whether it’s pretending that you’re a fireman rescuing people from certain death or a kid playing catch with his dad.

I read a post this morning by Brian Green talking about casual vs. hardcore games on Facebook. I suppose this could have been a comment on his blog but I felt the urge to respond here.

Brian wrote:

I had dinner recently with someone that is doing a startup that wants to do smaller-scale games. He did an AJAX implementation of a social space, but that project had it’s own special challenges. His most recent foray is to make some games for the Facebook platform. His company built two games: one a more casual game that deals with throwing parties, and a hard-core game that has a men-in-tights theme and zero-sum PvP type mechanics. Guess which one did better.

If you said, “Obviously the hardcore one!” you have learned to anticipate my sense of irony. Well, that and it’d be a boring post if I just validated most people’s assumptions.

So, why does the hard-core game beat out the casual game on a pretty broad platform like Facebook?

Well, first, I don’t think that any lessons at all can be drawn from a single game beating another single game. Second, casual games win, flat-out, on Facebook. Maybe that will change but it’s not the case currently. Here are the top 10 games on Facebook right now, in order of active, engaged players (meaning someone who touched the game at least once in the last 24 hours).

1. Scrabulous (casual). Scrabble, online. 569k daily active users
2. Texas HoldEm Poker (casual). 392k daily active users
3. Speed Racer (casual). 289k daily active users
4. fluff(Friends) (casual). 277k daily active users
5. Quizzes (casual). 273k daily active users
6. Jetman (casual). 258k daily active users
7. Mesmo (casual). 250k daily active users
8. Vampires (casual despite the vampire theme). 250k daily active users
9. Mindjolt Games (a collection of casual games via a flash client). 159k daily active users
10. Zombies (reskinning of Vampires. Casual). 154k daily active users

No hardcore games in the top 10. The top hardcore game on Facebook is Warbook, with 104k daily active users.

Now, it’s not quite as clear-cut as the above. The way Facebook measures engagement is way too simplistic and binary. Either you are counted as a daily active user or you’re not. There’s no scalar measurement of HOW engaged you are. I would bet a lot of money that the average active user on Warbook, for instance, spends a lot more time (ie is more engaged) on Warbook than the average Vampires user spends on that app.

It’s completely unsurprising that casual games dominate Facebook, but what’s interesting to watch are the medium-term dynamics surrounding active users vs. users w/ your app installed (some of the apps above have millions of users but daily active user rates ranging from ~3% to ~15% of their total users). The games that initially dominated Facebook (Vampires, Zombies, Slayers, Werewolves…they’re all exactly the same game, reskinned) were extremely light and barely games at all. They’re at least as much a way to just ‘poke’ someone, which says, “I’m thinking about you,” as they are games. Those early, very light games now have very very low engagement rates of 3-4%.

Now look at the top two game apps on Facebook (Scrabulous and Texas HoldEm). Both are big steps up in complexity from the Vampires apps, and have increased levels of engagement. Texas HoldEm has approximately twice the engagement (7%) while Scrabulous has an astounding 25% engagement rate. Typically, the only apps that get engagement that high are very new apps (which naturally have a higher engagement rate), but Scrabulous has held onto a high engagement rate consistently for awhile now. Why? Well, there’s depth there that isn’t there in Vampires. Once you’ve bitten a few people, engaged in a few (basically random) battles, the average user is done. On the other hand, you can actually get better at Scrabulous, and the possibility space is a lot larger. There’s skill involved, just like in Texas HoldEm.

On the other end of the spectrum you have the fairly complicated Warbook. It’s got a high engagement rate (13%) but hasn’t managed to achieve the level of popularity that the more casual apps have, despite doing pretty well. It’s probably a little on the heavy/hardcore side for the platform it’s on, though I’m sure its owners aren’t complaining. I’ve heard it generates hundreds of millions of pageviews a month.

So what’s the right level of depth to offer on Facebook? Will more hardcore games enter into the ranks of the popular Facebook apps or is Warbook (60th most popular app currently) an aberration? I’m sure we’re going to see other hardcore games gaining users on FB but the way in which people interact with FB (less than 20 minutes/day on average, etc) does not lend itself well to traditional hardcore games. Further, good games on FB are as much about communication and/or self-expression as they are about gameplay.

We (Sparkplay) are going to be launching our first Facebook game in a few weeks, and the design process is interesting when compared to what I’m used to working on (MUDs/MMOs). The biggest difference is that we just don’t care about cheating or exploits that are possible by creating multiple accounts nearly as much because as I said above, it’s as much about communicating with your friends and expressing yourself as it is about “winning.” Going to be fun to see what we learn from our first app. No better way to learn than by doing it!

This is pretty damn sweet.

Season #5 of what is probably the greatest drama ever broadcast on American television begins tonight, as HBO’s The Wire returns. There’s never been a series with the sheer level of consistent brilliance that the Wire shows in its writing, its directing, and its acting.

The Wire is the story of the decay of America as witnessed through the eyes of the city of Baltimore. David Simon, the creator, lead writer, and exec producer of The Wire, is from Baltimore and knows it intimately. He worked for the Baltimore Sun (their primary newspaper) for twelve years, and wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets in 1991 about his experience shadowing members of the Baltimore Police Dept Homicide force. That, of course, was the foundation for the tv series Homicide: Life on the Streets, which Simon worked on as both producer and writer.

The Wire’s first four seasons are intricately layered broad story arcs focusing on different aspects of Baltimore. In Season 1, Simon showed us life in the ghetto and introduced us both to the street-level dealers and the behind-the-scenes local drug bosses, who would figure prominently in the series until the end of Season 3. It also introduced us to the cops who drift in and out of prominence throughout the series.

Season 1 got horrible ratings. Why? It was incredible from literally the first scene in the first episode of the first season. It is, however, difficult. The Wire does not coddle its viewers and it expects them to commit to taking the time and care necessary to fully appreciate every aspect of its excellence. In a country where brainless tv like “Deal or No Deal” dominates the ratings, it’s unsurprising that The Wire didn’t do well I guess.

In Season 2, Simon and HBO ignored the public reaction and went for it. Although the story arcs from season 1 continued, they were backgrounded and the focus shifted to a set of new characters who represented the decline of the working class, as represented by the docks at the Port of Baltimore, and the people who work there. I love Simon for this. I mean, switching about 70% of your character focus takes balls, and it worked in spades.

In Season 3, Simon switched the focus away from the docks and into the political arena. Issues of race have been prevalent throughout seasons 1 and 2 but here they come to more of a forefront as a white councilman challenges the black mayor (in a city whose politics are fairly racially divisive apparently). The story arc that began in season 1 involving two behind-the-scenes drug lords comes to a conclusion in this season.

Season 4 switches to the schools and here Simon is continuing to show that no matter the best efforts of a few, the whole system is set up to encourage failure. It’s pretty soul-crushing to watch some of the kids and their almost inevitable downward spiral.

Season 5 is moving the focus to the media, specifically the Baltimore Sun where Simon worked for twelve years. The previews of this season that I’ve read suggest that it is nothing but awesome, provided you don’t actually work for or empathize with the Sun.

It’s going to be the saddest day in my tv watching history when this season of The Wire ends. I love HBO for being willing to fund this series (which cannot possibly have been a direct commercial success) thus far and hope that the buzz around season 5 is sufficient to let them see a win on at least this last season.

Go rent or buy season 1 on DVD if you’ve never watched The Wire. Even if you don’t like police dramas (I do not, as a general rule), The Wire will blow you away if you invest the time/energy into appreciating it.

George W. would never have been President if he wasn’t the son of a previous President. Hilary would not be a Senator or a Presidential Candidate had she not been the wife of a President.

What does it say about America today that there is a realistic chance that we could see 28 consecutive years of executive rule by two families? Sounds like some 3rd world country that labels its government “The People’s Republic” and is anything but to me.

I’d love to see a woman President. Just not one who is there because she was married to a previous President. Dynasties do not fit into the scheme of democracy. Keep that in mind today, Iowa.

I’ve not been blogging much lately as you’ve no doubt noticed. Sorry about that. Work has become a bit all-consuming. As it doesn’t require much thought or time I figured I’d throw up a list of my favorite games of 2007. Here it is in all its not-quite-glory! The games are listed in no particular order as I couldn’t really tell you whether I enjoyed playing Puzzle Quest 6 months ago more than I’m enjoying Rock Band today, for instance.

• Supreme Commander - Greatest RTS ever made. PC.
• Mario Galaxy - It’s the reason you buy a Wii. Two-player mode (aka ‘girlfriend mode’) is awesome for playing with one’s less-of-a-gamer significant other. Wii.
• Rock Band - Because Ronnie James Dio would want you to play it. And because if you ever want a job with us, you better be able to play one of the instruments on ‘Hard’ or ‘Expert.’ Remember that “sucking at Rock Band” is not yet a protected category when it comes to discrimination in the hiring process. Xbox 360.
• Puzzle Quest - I hate match-three games, and yet I loved Puzzle Quest. Played it on the DS.
• Portal - I still feel bad about murdering my Companion Cube. Had I known that a birthday party with Companion Cube in attendance was a possibility, I probably wouldn’t have murdered it. Played it on the 360.
• Halo 3 - The best multiplayer action game ever made as far as I’m concerned, though I have never really been into PC-based shooters so I recognize I’ve got a huge blind spot here. 360.
• Settlers of Catan - I played a lot of Settlers on Xbox Live. My girlfriend, on the other hand, continues to be addicted to it and takes every opportunity possible to “get her Catan on.” 360 - Xbox Live.

Rock Band….rocks. The major downside is that the equipment they ship with the game is quite poorly-made for the most part. For instance, one of my drumsticks has already broken, as has the strummer on the guitar. Apparently more than a few people are having problems with the strummer though to their credit EA has made it easy to return the guitar and get a new one.

A couple friends have seen their bass pedal break already and I’m sure mine will as well, as it’s very cheaply manufactured. Luckily, some enterprising fellow is selling an aluminum plate you can screw onto your pedal, thus saving it from your perhaps slightly over-zealous rocking. I played on a reinforced pedal last night and it was delightful. Just ordered one for myself, and I suggest that anyone else who aspires to to Neil Peart status pick one up as well.

Why Rock Band? Why? Why do you not alert me, in big letters that I cannot miss, that there’s new downloaded content (ie new songs) available for purchase? I know new songs come out every Tuesday but I bet most RB users have no idea. As someone who is keenly interested in seeing Rock Band become a platform for new music, I beg you to please shove the downloadable content (DLC) in front of your users. They will not resent it. They’ll be thrilled to know you’re offering them new songs. But listen: If you don’t let them know the DLC is there, can you expect them to go buy it and validate your platform as an ongoing concern in a way that Guitar Hero has failed at aside from releasing sequels? (Guitar Hero always teased us with the promise of lots of downloadable content but they always reneged nearly immediately.)

Communicate what you have to offer to your users more effectively!

Jeremy Liew has an interesting post up today about fantasy sports as asynchronous MMOs, which was itself spawned by an article in early November by Charles Hudson about fantasy football as casual games for men. I’m not a fan of watching sports and don’t play fantasy sports but I get some of the appeal, and while I wouldn’t classify fantasy sports as an MMO (I’m a traditionalist - if there’s no world representation, it’s not an MMO) I think Jeremy and Charles are right insofar as they serve the same purpose and have a great deal of similarity.

Charles talks about a few of the game mechanics that make fantasy football work so well for men (it’s a multi-billion dollar industry as well):

• Simple game mechanics - If you understand how the NFL works, you can play fantasy football.
• There is a good combination of luck, skill, and strategy. Skill comes in working the waiver wire, doing your homework before the draft, and staying on top of who’s emerging during the course of the season… However, there’s a lot of luck involved - you can’t control who gets injured and how long they’re out.
• The time commitment is manageable (unlike other fantasy sports) - You can basically manage a fantasy football team in a few hours a week… The beauty of fantasy football is that almost all of the action takes place in about 24 hours per week.
• Fantasy football is a social experience - Go to any sports bar on Sunday and make an offhand comment about one of the players on your team. Guaranteed you’ll get at least a few other folks at the bar who have a rooting interest in one player or team. Because the rules for fantasy football are fairly universal, two players in separate leagues can often have a good conversation around fantasy football in general.

He’s bang-on, I think, but he leaves out one huge factor: story. Whenever people tell me they don’t understand the appeal of spectator sports I sum it up for them that single word. Though they’re not for me, people who are really wrapped up in a particular sport and, usually, a particular team are very into ongoing stories that evolve from the activity in and around the sport.

When I think of the sports moments that stick in my mind they are all wrapped in a very strong story. For instance, the 1980 US victory over the heavily-favored Soviet ice hockey team in the game called “the Miracle on Ice.” I’m sure it was dramatic based on the play alone but I don’t remember any of that. I remember feeling, at 8 years old, like this game represented the forces of good against evil (one is allowed to indulge in over-simplification when one is that age), and that somehow a defeat for the Soviets was some kind of tangible payback for the evil they’d done my father.

Think of other monumental sports moments: Jesse Owens embarassing Hitler at the ‘36 Olympics, Jackie Robinson signing with the Dodgers, Michael Jordan’s entire career, virtually every big fight Muhammed Ali fought in (Cassius Clay vs. Sonny Liston and Ali vs. Foreman in “The Rumble in the Jungle” come to mind), and so on. They’re all powerful because of the stories that back them.

My point is that sports contain, to those who keep abreast of what’s happening, an astonishing myriad of stories, and your hardcore sports fan is, in effect, watching a soap opera with a cast of thousands, spanning decades. Further, they’re not just watching them. They’re participating through retelling the stories and discussing them with friends or strangers at the bar, by playing sports video games, and of course, by playing fantasy sports.

It all makes for a massive, coherent (if uninstantiated) world with rules, players, guilds/teams, and plenty of story. MMO players would be wetting their pants with joy if the stories in their favorite games evolved at the same pace they do in sports.

Gamebunny has a Q&A up about Earth Eternal. I am my usual feisty and blunt self.

I realized that although we announced Sparkplay Media a couple of weeks ago, I neglected to reference it here.

Briefly, we (Iron Realms) have spun off Earth Eternal and future graphical products into a separate company called Sparkplay Media. We’ve got some pretty interesting plans that go well beyond EE but they’re going to have to remain under cover for now.

We announced the first member of our Board of Advisors recently, and it’s fair to say that his mainstream media history speaks to our long-term ambitions. We have very definite ideas on how online gaming in general (from MMOs to casual) will evolve and we think what we’re planning strongly addresses that future. I’m looking forward to talking about what we’re up to, and in any case my strong suspicion is that we’re going to see a lot of groups planning similar strategies in the next 6-12 months, because our plans do not require a leap of genius to get to. It’s just a natural evolution for the industry, whether we’re the ones to execute first on it or not.

Rock Band Rules!

(”The King is Dead, Long Live the King!“)

Rock Band is out. I have purchased it, which is a given if you know me or read this blog regularly. As I realize there are some people who read this who don’t know what Rock Band is, I’ll explain: Guitar Hero was a game that let you play (by hitting 5 buttons on the neck) a 2/3-sized guitar along to mainly cover versions of guitar-driven songs. It was fantastic. Truly. Rock Band, on the other hand, is nothing short of revelatory. Not only can you play the guitar, but you can play drums (it comes with a 4 pad electronic drum set) and sing (comes with a microphone).

Unfortunately I only had time to play two songs tonight, which is killing me. Eileen (girlfriend) played drums and I sung. We chose that combo because it’s going to be challenging for both of us. She’s never drummed (I was one of those drummer band geeks in high school) and I can’t sing. Imagine a wounded panther bellowing its death screams as it sinks in an eternal pit of Jello pudding and you have the idea. Under normal circumstances I spare my fellow man the horror of my voice lifted in song but Rock Band kicks so much ass that I don’t feel bad about inflicting my cracking cry upon Eileen and Nixon (dog).

Guitar Hero transformed the experience of hitting buttons rhythmically (something I’m fairly good at) into the feeling of being Eddie Van Halen or Stevie Vai. Rock Band goes you one better. Not only can pretend to be Eddie or Stevie, but you can actually be Neal Peart (drummer for Rush) or Kurt Cobain (lead singer for Nirvana). While the guitar parts are purely game-like (insofar as they are nothing like really playing the guitar), the drumming and singing are, on the harder levels, virtually exactly like really doing those things.

Rock Band is the greatest educational game ever created. Guitar Hero is dead to me. Long Live Rock Band!

This is…I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s….well, just watch it. Prepare to creeped out somewhere between a little and a lot.

I’ve made precious few posts lately as I just don’t have time but I wanted to write briefly about some games I’ve played recently. (The great thing about working in games is that you legitimately have to make time to play games.)

Halo 3
I wrote about my first impressions a few weeks ago here. I haven’t had a chance to finish the campaign yet but the multiplayer continues to be flat-out awesome. Whether it’s a 16 man big team battle complete with ground and air vehicles or an every-man-for-himself deathmatch the game is polished to an incredible level. The machinima capabilities are amazing as well. The highly-polished ability to watch every match from any angle, follow any player around, etc is unprecedented in console gaming. I will be playing Halo 3 a few hours a week for a long time to come no doubt.

Portal
Great little game. At 3 hours I got a chance to actually finish it. The humor is exceptionally well-done (possibly the funniest game I recall playing) and I could have messed with the core ‘portaling’ gameplay for many hours more. I would love to see their core gameplay extended into a multiplayer FPS.

Guitar Hero 3
An awesome track list composed mostly of original master tracks (rather than covers as in the previous GH games) sold me on this. I hadn’t been planning on buying it since Rock Band comes out later this month but I couldn’t resist the song list. There’s nothing innovative here (which is fine. Innovation is overrated when it comes to fun.) but there is a feature so annoying that I quit playing career mode in disgust. In essence, you have to suffer a ‘boss battle’ every now and then in career mode. In battle mode, you and your opponent don’t gain star power, but instead gain the ability to ruin the game for the other person. Switch the notes so that they’re displaying as if for a left-handed guitar, breaking a ’string’ on your guitar, make the screen blur and shake, etc.

I had tried the battle mode against a friend and we quit after about 30 seconds as it’s got absolutely nothing to do with what makes Guitar Hero great. I am a GH fan because it lets me feel like I’m a, well, guitar hero. When I’m rocking out on ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ I am Slash. It’s fantasy fulfillment. The thing is, breaking your opponent’s strings or flipping his guitar around to make him play lefty has nothing to do with rocking out. It’s just completely unrelated to the wish fulfillment that makes Guitar Hero the greatest fantasy fulfillment game in the history of man, at least until Rock Band is released in a couple weeks. Worse: the battle mode bullshit isn’t just irrelevant, it actively destroys the experience by taking you out of the ‘flow’ of the game like a frying pan to the face.

So here I am, the biggest Guitar Hero fan among my friends, and I had to resort to using a cheat code to unlock all the songs since I simply refuse to play through the game on career mode (required to unlock the full track list) if I’m going to be forced to engage in battle mode during it. I am pleased to note that Damion has equally strong feelings about the crapness of boss battles.

Upcoming Games I’m Greatly Anticipating

• Super Mario Galaxy (Wii) I really hope this becomes the first game for the Wii that I like. So far, the Wii is a complete disappointment to me. I can’t even get into Zelda or Metroid, which saddens me. Everything I’ve read about SM Galaxy tells me I’m going to love it but disappointment and video games are frequent companions in my world.
• Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance (PC) I was completely addicted to Supreme Commander for about 5 months earlier this year and I cannot wait to pick this up this weekend (it’s already out). It’s the finest RTS (real-time strategy) game I’ve played and the expansion looks to simply, well, expand upon the goodness. The only problem here is that my favorite Supcom games are with 4 people on large maps. That setup tends to require 1.5-3 hours to finish a game and it’s hard to find that much consecutive time to play.
• Rock Band (360) Duh.
• Mass Effect (360) It’s Bioware, it’s in space, and it looks awesome.
• Assassin’s Creed (360) I don’t know if I’ll actually play this or not (depends on the reviews) but I will be pleased to be able to stop hearing about it and about its attractive female producer, Jade Raymond. It is a sad, sad comment on our industry when the simple fact that an attractive female is involved in a non-HR/marketing role is cause for publicity. I’m forced to conclude that the same embarassing nerds who used to wet themselves in excitement while getting a picture of themselves with a semi-attractive ‘booth babe’ draped over them at E3 are driving the Jade Raymond fan bus.

I really do try not to bring politics into this blog too often but I cannot help myself sometimes and am likely to give in more often with the primaries coming up. I think all the major candidates on both sides of the aisle suck but Rudy Giuliani scares the hell out of me. He was recently asked if he thought waterboarding constituted torture. His reply:

“It depends on how it’s done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it.”

What I think Rudy is implying here is that if the Iranians were to use waterboarding on a captured American, it’d be torture, but if the Americans were to use waterboarding on a captured Iranian, it’d be “aggressive questioning” or some other euphemism.

This kind of double standard (along with, for instance, America telling Turkey that it shouldn’t strike at the Kurdish terrorists sitting across its border when America went across the world to invade a country that did not contain terrorists striking at the US) exemplifies why America has lost its role as the moral leader of the free world. It is indefensible to decide that behavior A is evil if done by actor Y but fine if done by actor Z. We are defined by our actions, not the other way around.

Raph has a great post about the way in which virtual worlds are likely to continue to enter the mainstream. In short, he points out that chat is not enough. Purely social virtual worlds are destined to stay out of the mainstream as socializing-only will not keep people around. What does? Unsurprisingly, gamey virtual worlds, which account for probably 99% of virtual world users (something the media seems to forget quite often). Why unsurprisingly? Well, as with so many things in this space, one just has to look at the venerable text MUD market. The social worlds (MOOs, MUCKs, etc) are dwarfed in popularity and number by the gamey worlds. There’s no reason to expect that’s going to change just because you write a 3d client for a world.

What it comes down to is that games are one of the best way we know to engage users. Games are often some of the most engaging experiences available. For instance, Runescape is the most engaging website for UK users - they spend more time on it per user than any other site. AdventureQuest is also in the top 7 in the UK, though neither of these are in the top 50 sites in terms of page views.

If we look at the platform du jour - Facebook - we find that of the top 25 apps in terms of daily active users, games account for about 15 of them. The most popular tv broadcasts? Games (Superbowl, World Cup, etc).

Games are mainstream. Virtual worlds are not yet but the gamey ones are the only ones that come close to it. Second Life might get namechecked frequently in the media but the frequency of that is completely unrelated to how many people actually use it. I feel like saying this is stating the obvious but there’s such a bubble around social virtual worlds that I’m unsure how distorted ‘obvious’ has become to those in the bubble.

(What Would Don Draper Do?)

If you’re not watching AMC’s Mad Men, I feel sorry for you. Season 1 finished last week (though I’m just watching it now thanks to Tivo). Go get it on iTunes.
That is all.

This is pretty cool. The NFL is creating its own virtual world, with an area for each team. Looks like somewhat customizable avatars w/ minigames. The style they’ve chosen is interesting. I am not the target demographic of this world (in as far as I don’t like watching sports) and upon showing this to one of my football-obsessed friends I am wondering who they are targetting. My friend (in my highly scientific survey of one person) thought it looked ridiculous and embodied absolutely nothing that he loves about football, but he’s got to be among the hardest of the hardcore (brags that he hasn’t missed watching a Bears game since 1985 or something).

This looks to me like a play to get kids interested in football and the NFL brand at a younger age than many do currently rather than a play to extend the NFL experience into virtual worlds for adult fans. This kind of brand-strengthening play is, I think, going to be the dominant form of virtual world going forward (think MTV’s various virtual worlds, Barbie Virtual World, etc) though I wonder how many we’re going to see that aren’t targeted at tweens/teens until the generation that has grown up with somewhat mainstream virtual worlds gets older.

On a related note, though there’s no CSI virtual world, this week’s much-hyped CSI tie-in with Second Life is squarely aimed at adults, and I think it’s going to be interesting to see what kind of adoption SL gets from this brand tie-in.

About a year ago I wrote about the idea of using split-testing to refine the user experience in online games (it’s not really suitable for stand-alone retail games). Today I caught a brief article on Redline China talking about how the Chinese online game giant Zhengtu is using a very simple version of split-testing for its newest online game - Juren. (For those who aren’t familiar, Zhengtu’s biggest game - Zhengtu Online - is, I believe, the #2 MMO in China, behind Fantasy Westward Journey. Don’t feel too bad if you’re a Westerner and haven’t heard of them.)

Zhengtu is running two version of Juren during its beta test, and will launch the game with the more popular one, along with selected favorite features from the other version. It’s the most basic, single-pass implementation of split-testing that one could implement but it’s an interesting step in the right direction. What I’d love to see would be a multi-step process, since split-testing works best when you can fairly quickly pick a ‘winner’ and a ‘loser’ among two options, and then take the winner and put it up against another version, rinse, and repeat.

Figuring out how to do multi-stage split-testing in games is kind of a holy grail in terms of user acquisition I feel like. It’s hard, because it requires real, live users and because altering games to set up new cases for split-testing is a lot more work than doing so with ad copy (where split-testing originated), but think of the potential for tuning your newbie experience when you can, in a matter of a day, objectively measure what is the stickier experience, then take the winning experience and pit it against a new variation, etc. It’s actually kind of ideally suited for text MUDs given the relatively low content creation costs except for the fact that text MUD populations are not big enough to split in half without major social costs (though one could possibly separate off the newbie experience and then route people into “the game” once they’re done with the newbie stage).

No-chance-in-hell-but-sports-a-hot-wife Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich has opened an official HQ in Second Life. I’m unsure how significant this really is though. The director of multimedia for the campaign, Chad Ely, had this to say, “We do them all,” said Ely. “Any and all ways we can get out to the people and let them know about Dennis Kucinich. That’s all we have to do. He’s got all the other candidates beat on the issues, so his stand on the issues will do the job for us.”

I certainly agree with Mr. Ely regarding Kucinich having all the other candidates beat on the issues but it won’t make a bit of difference in the election. He has zero realistic chance of winning, which is why he can afford to get into Second Life. He doesn’t have to worry about tarring himself with SL’s image problems, so I’m not sure whether this represents a vote of confidence in Second Life or just effectively checking off a box on a list of any and all social networking opportunities they can think of.

I have an interesting dilemma. We have 16 player races for Earth Eternal, but the world is not black and white like, say, WoW’s (where either you are on the Horde side or the Alliance side, and what race you pick completely determines that. There is no real possibility within their story/world/game rules for a human (Alliance side) to decide that the Tauren are noble creatures worth allying with and effectively switching sides as a result. This certainly simplifies things in some ways as you’re able to, 100% of the time, easily identify an enemy or a potential friend by just glancing at his/her race.

Read the rest of this entry »

And in equally timely news, Next-Gen Biz writes that a new report out from consulting firm the Yankee Group says that Second Life is overhyped.

The report’s conclusions are fairly silly though, at least from the quotes in Next Gen, which writes, “Yankee Group said that the lack of growth may be attributed to the fact that people are opting to go mobile instead of sitting in front of a PC.” They quoted Yankee Group as saying, “Despite near-continuous coverage in the popular and business press, metaverses like Second Life are experiencing slowing growth and limited impact because of the tethered nature of their virtual world experience.”

Second Life isn’t stagnating because it’s not got a mobile client or because it requires a PC to use. It’s a niche product and it’s captured about as much of its niche as it looks likely to capture.

MPOGD has an interview with me today about Earth Eternal. I talk a bit about the character customization we’re going to allow, address the “furry issue” briefly, and expose my megalomania.

I intend on writing a more complete review later but I wanted to add some comments while my first experience with Halo 3 is fresh in my mind. To provide a little personal context, I loved the first Halo. I played the campaign all the way through three times, mainly on split-screen co-op, and different individual parts of it many more than three. I’ve never played a campaign mode in any game all the way through more than once, much less three times. Beyond that, since there was no online play my friend Rodney used to drag his Xbox over a lot and we’d play 1v1 on system link, on two TVs, taking somewhat extreme measures to ensure we didn’t get any audio clues from each other’s games (we had the tvs in the same room): I wore headphones with the volume turned way up and we had an industrial fan going to create enough white noise that we could guarantee neither one of us was getting an unfair advantage by hearing what his opponent was up to.

Read the rest of this entry »

There is absolutely no point to this post other than to celebrate my excitement over the imminent release of Halo 3 tonight at midnight. We don’t take the day off for silly American holidays like Columbus Day, but you bet your ass we’re taking the day off for Halo 3.

Most exciting feature: 4 player co-op play.

Biggest Fear: Getting the red ring of death just as I fire up Master Chiefy goodness tomorrow morning.

Metaplace (the product from Areae) just launched at TechCrunch 40. Good luck Raph!

I don’t much care for social networks. I use LinkedIn (profile here if you’re interested) very lightly, and not at all for ’social’ reasons. There’s little value for me in MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, or any of the other countless platforms as I am simply not interested in the collecting “friends” mechanic on a personal level. Obviously, there’s no disputing that millions of people find social networks very useful. I’m just not one of them. I also dislike cell phones and rarely carry mine (of course, I also work from a home office, making it less useful than it might otherwise be) because I’m not a fan of feeling like I’m always on a leash that anyone can yank. I often leave my IM status set to ‘away’ for the same reason, as people don’t get offended when I ignore non-essential IMs that way.

Today though, a friend pointed me at a new network focused on being unsocial called NOSO. From their FAQ:

“NOSO is a real-world platform for temporary disengagement from social networking environments. The NOSO experience offers a unique opportunity to create NO Connections by scheduling NO Events with other NO Friends.

These “NO” events, called NOSOs, take place in designated cafes, parks, libraries, bookstores, and other public spaces. Participants - whose identities remain unknown to one another - agree to arrive at an assigned time and remain alone, quiet and un-connected, while at the same time knowing that another “Friend” is present in the space.

NOSOs are scheduled by users through the NOSO website. They last for a duration of 1 - 30 minutes, after which participants disperse and return to their regular activities.”

It is like they read my mind. I am all for participating in social events in which I don’t have to even acknowledge the presence of the other participants barring those I show up with (such as Eileen and, if it is a dog-friendly unsocial event, Nixon).

Here is a handy YouTube video-less video that will tell you more. It’s an interview with CBC up in the frozen north. I did create a profile on NOSO but I feel it’s most appropriate if I don’t provide anyone a link to it and if I never visit it again.

It’s a bit of a developers’ cliche that players will consume content faster than you imagined was reasonably possible. I bet that when the good folks at Blizzard were developing the Burning Crusade expansion for WoW they intended to create new content that would last months for your average player. Indeed, it probably does take months for your average player to get through it.

It must be annoying to then discover that someone has burned through the expansion in less than 24 hours.

On September 9, 1997, Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands, the first game from what would become Iron Realms Entertainment was launched (same month as Ultima Online!). We weren’t ready by any means but I opened it to the public because I was tired of working without player feedback.

People at the time told me I was crazy for opening a commercial MUD just as the first major graphical MMO was due to launch, but 10 years down the road I feel like I can convincingly say that those who felt text MUDs were going to fall over and die just because someone created a game with a graphical UI were very wrong. We’ve managed 10 consecutive years of double-digit growth in a medium that so many people were convinced was an absolute commercial dead-end.

A friend opined to me the other day that one of his big problems in his approach was that he wouldn’t let go of an idea. He felt it was in his nature to keep at an idea well past the point where other people might call it quits. I can see where he’s coming from, I suppose, but I’ve always viewed tenacity as a net positive. It may be cliche but the willingness to simply push on is what got me, at least, through the early and very lean years.

The teams running each of our text MUDs have been running events for the previous month, ramping up to tons of events this weekend. I logged onto Achaea tonight to be part of the festivities as the hour approached midnight GMT and was taken aback by the outpouring of more-than-just-friendly communication from players whom hadn’t seen me in the two years since I passed over direct control of Achaea to others.

It’s hard to describe what I feel about Achaea at this point. It’s a creative endeavor I worked on full-time from 1995 to 2005 and poured my soul into. It was difficult to pass on and it is a little painful to log in now and realize that the game-world has passed me by. I don’t know the details of the intricate plots going on any more and I don’t have my finger so directly on the pulse of the community, but I still feel incredibly connected to it. I essentially lived in Achaea for 8 or 9 years.

I’m extraordinarily grateful to a huge number of people at this point. All the players over the last ten years, the volunteers, and all the formal members of Iron Realms. Thank you. Let’s make the next 10 years as great as the last ten.

Incidentally, it is pronounced ah-KAY-ah. ‘Achaeans’ was the generic term for the Greeks that fought against Troy in the Trojan War, and there was an ‘Achaean League’ in real/more established ancient Grecian history as well. The Aetolian League defeated the Achaean League at one point.

Fun liveblog of the AGC panel on where the biggest opportunities in games are over at Virtual World News. Raph Koster, Erik Bethke, Mark Jacobs, and John Smedley go at it in a debate that basically turns into subscriptions vs. microtransactions and RMT.

Madeleine L’Engle has died at the age of 88.

I have nothing but great memories of the four books in her Time series, “A Wrinkle in Time“, “A Wind in the Door“, “A Swiftly Tilting Planet,” and “Many Waters.” I suppose technically they’re children’s books but Minae, the producer for Achaea, just re-read them and said they hold up quite well. I’ve just ordered them from Amazon. What I remember about her books were the fairly metaphysical (not that I understood this at the time I first read them) themes running through them. They are very ‘adult’ children’s books if one wants to consider them children’s books. I think they may have been the first fantasy/sci-fi books I ever read, though I kind of hesitate to call them either. Go read them if you haven’t. Easy, short reads but well worth it.

I live in terror these days. Sheer, heart-stopping panic, unmitigated by reason. What, you ask, could terrify me so aside from the obvious (landsharks)?

The Red Ring of Death.

Those around me fall like wheat before the scythe, as a fourth close friend experienced the red ring of death that signals complete system failure for an Xbox 360. I don’t call too many people close friends so it is disturbing enough to know that the Reaper is stalking us. Still, I’m possessed of powerful Warranty Magic so the Reaper alone cannot chill my heart with this kind of foreboding.

Nay. The grim hand of dread that has gripped my soul this morning derives from the realization that were I to experience the foul Ring now, as did my CTO Chris last night, I would likely not get my console back until after September 25th. My god, just writing that has turned my muscles to jelly and is that a bit of wetness I feel dripping down my left leg?

Poor Chris (who went through four of the original Xboxs) has already resolved that he’ll need to purchase a new 360 because, “I will NOT wait to blast some motherfuckers with a Spartan Laser!”

So please, pray for me my friends. If there’s an ounce of humanity in you, pray that I am not marked by the red ring before the 25th. Pray to any God that will listen. (Try Hephaestus. His forges turn out quality stuff.)

And now, I am off to a local farm. There’ll be lamb’s blood on all the doors to stay the Reaper’s hand, and tonight Mr. Gates shall sup on a burnt offering of the finest organic, sustainably-raised Sonoma lamb.

This post has nothing to do with virtual worlds, games, or anything related so feel free to skip it.

(Little lesson on America’s electoral college system that is, I sincerely hope, only of benefit to citizens of other countries.) In 2000, George W. Bush won the Presidency by getting less votes than Al Gore (the first time this had officially happened since 1888. There is an argument to be made it happened in 1960 as well). On the other hand, because the US employs a system in which your vote for President simply does not count if you don’t vote for the winning candidate in your state, George W. Bush still won the election (granted, the courts had to get involved but that is how the legal system works and it worked properly, arguably). In 48 out of the 50 states, our system is “winner takes all.”

So, imagine that a state has, for the sake of argument, 1 million actual voters and there are only two candidates on the ballot for President. Candidate A gets 500,000 votes. Candidate B gets 499,999 votes. Since America always pitches itself as a democracy, one would think that this might mean that Candidate A just gained a whopping 1 vote advantage in the election. But no! What it actually means, effectively, is that Candidate A just gained all 1 million votes (in all states but Nebraska and Maine, both of which are very small and don’t have many votes to send anyway). I’m simplifying a bit insofar as what Candidate A actually gets is 100% of the electoral college votes from our hypothetical state, and the electoral college votes determine who becomes President. Though it’s never yet happened the system actually makes it possible for candidate A to win by an absolute landslide in terms of how many people voted for him/her, but still lose the election because candidate B got a plurality of votes in a few of the biggest states.

Seems a little absurd doesn’t it? Almost a little, dare I say, undemocratic? There are historical reasons why America does things this way, as well as legitimate-sounding arguments to keep the system as is, but I strongly believe that most Americans, if given a choice between 1:1 representation and the current system would overwhelmingly choose 1:1 representation (since that is actually the spirit of what we’re taught is the essence of democracy)…right up until it was explained that this might, short-term, lead to defeat for the political party they favor.

After the 2000 election, there was lots of muttering on the Democratic side about the unfairness of the electoral college system and how if it was actually “fair” Gore would have been President since a plurality of the country voted for him. I completely agree. America is no longer a collection of disparate States joining together for a common purpose (I am willing to bet that far more people self-identify as American before “Idahoan” or “Wisconsonian” or what have you). It is a State with small, less important states within it.

A serious debate has begun in California about reforming our system here to allow for somewhat proportional representation. It’s not a perfect proposal insofar as what it does is move the system in California down to the Congressional district level (so winner-take-all per district rather than true 1:1 representation) but it’s a hell of a lot better than what we have now.

Of course, since California has been voting Democratic for President lately, it is the Republicans pushing for this change. They know darn well that this change will result in a better chance of putting a Republican in the White House. Everybody sees this. It’s also a blatantly politically-timed move in an attempt to pass a bill before the ‘08 elections.

But so what? Shouldn’t conforming to the essence of what we tell our children democracy is outweigh “supporting the team”? The electoral college could use some reforming when it helps the Democrats, but not when it helps the Republicans? That is fundamentally corrupt thinking.

Principle should come before party and neither of those parties will ever get my vote, at least, until and unless they stop behaving as if winning the game rather than consistently sticking to principle is what matters. Not only is this unlikely but the winner-takes-all electoral college system makes it fundamentally very difficult for a third party to win or even make a showing since you get no electoral votes without winning a plurality in a state.

“One person one vote” is fair and democratic. The current system is not.

Warning: If you don’t want to read spoilers, don’t read this post!

I finished Bioshock this evening. I don’t finish too many games but this this one was pretty short overall. I’m not sure how long it took but it couldn’t have been more than 12 hours, which is fine with me. Took me 2 weeks to get those 12 hours in as it was.

The day I got the game, I wrote a very excited post about how much I was looking forward to playing through it after having logged a couple hours of play time. Unfortunately, my interest in the game declined pretty much linearly from that moment on. I simply do not understand why this game has been reviewed so well unless the reviewers only played the first hour or two of the game.

The pluses:

• A pretty game. Very, very nicely-done art in an attractive art deco-ish style. Not too many games use art deco, so that was refreshing. In fact, I think it was one of the things that initially suckered me into believing this was anything but a standard FPS wrapped in a huge hype ribbon.
• The writing was not offensively bad. That’s a big step up over most games (probably including my own). Compared to most games the writing was excellent, in fact, but that’s not a very high bar to leap over.
• Bug-free. Though I can’t speak for anyone else’s experience, mine was mercifully 100% free of bugs…just like all console games should be. Patching console games is lame. Still, this is the single 360 game I’ve played thus far for any length of time in which I didn’t notice any bugs.
• The first 2 minutes. Possibly the best opening I’ve ever seen in any video game in any format.

The minuses:

• The hype machine. I came into this with huge expectations. There was going to be this great storyline. There were going to be innovative gameplay mechanics. There were going to be real moral choices to make. All hype. I mean, don’t get me wrong, this is still a great game. It’s just not an awesome one, to my taste.
• The story. I don’t tend to enjoy first person shooters, and pretty much the only way I’ll typically play one is if it allows for co-op play. Bioshock was pitched as having this engrossing story that shows games are art, blah blah blah, but if that’s art then pardon me, but big fucking deal. I mean the climax of the game is an absolutely standard battle against this larger-than-life guy who can throw fire, ice, and electricity. Call him a wizard or a super-villain and there are probably well over a 1000 games that culminated in essentially exactly this way. Big let-down.The other big letdown is that the story is almost entirely communicated to you by listening to tape recorders. Very little of what you actually do has any bearing whatsoever on the story. What you spend 99% of the game doing is shooting what amount to zombies, some of which throw fireballs, some of which leap at you, but all of which look more or less the same.
• The gameplay. In your right hand you wield a weapon (various types of guns/projectile weapons) to attack things with. It has limited ammo, aside from the basic melee weapon (a wrench). In your left hand you wield ‘plasmids’ which are flat-out D&D-type spells. Fireball, lightning bolt, etc etc. Then, you walk around shooting things. That is the extent of the gameplay barring a minigame that is used for everything from opening safes to disabling attacking security bots to hacking into security cameras. By the end of the game I truly loathed that stupid minigame, which feels very awkwardly stuffed into the game to me. The most valuable thing in the game for me ended up being auto-hacking tools since they allowed me to mainly avoid the minigame.
• The supposed moral choices. There was exactly one really meaningful choice to make in Bioshock, though you repeated that choice multiple times (perhaps 15 in all?). The choice is between killing these freakish little girls and getting X of a resource called ‘Adam’ (used to buy new spells or “plasmids” if you prefer) or not killing them and only getting X/2 of the resources. Of course, in the latter case you’re compensated after every 3 girls you rescue with gifts that more or less make up for what you lost. So in fact, the moral choice doesn’t even have any meaningful consequences for you, which makes it a trivial choice at best.
• The “social commentary.” Sorry, but criticizing objectivism (Ayn Rand’s economic/moral psuedo-philosophy) is like criticizing Scientology. Satire, not criticism, is where it’s at for ideas that are just patently not worth taking seriously. Bioshock took itself very seriously and I occasionally got the impression that the developers felt they were really making a philosophical statement by incorporating some of the basics of Rand’s “philosophy” into the ostensible bad guy.

I suspect that had I rented this rather than bought it (definitely does not pass my ‘buy’ test in retrospect) and had I not been seeing ratings like 9.9 out of 10 and 5/5, and had I not read all sorts of people putting forth the notion that Bioshock is a credible comeback to Ebert’s assertion that games are not art, I would have been reasonably positive about it. On the other hand, there’s an equal chance that after the first hour or two I would have just gotten bored and turned it off. Had I known what was in store for me, that’s exactly what I would have done. I just kept holding out for the payoff (like with Fable) that never came and when I was done I was mostly just glad to be done forever with it.

I don’t like to get involved in the “Are games art” debate in public because my opinions may offend my fellow developers, but I’ll say this: If you hold Bioshock up as an example of the best art that the games industry produces, then you’re essentially saying, to my ears, is, “Dawn of the Dead is the pinnacle of film.” (And that’s unfair to Dawn of the Dead, which is a pretty well-done satire on something very real: rampant consumerism.)

I don’t mean to criticize Irrational/2k Boston (the devs) either, or damn them with faint praise. Bioshock is absolutely one of the most polished game experiences I’ve had in awhile. I just felt quite misled by the hype preceding the game’s release as well as the first minute of the game (which is awesome and literally bears no relationship to the rest of the game).

Overall, I’d give Bioshock, say, a 9.1 rather than the 9.9s its been getting.

Auto Assault, a vehicle-based MMO that never really took off, will be shut down tonight at midnight.

MMOs have been shutting down for 20+ years so this is hardly new but it’s still a bit sad in the same way that I find it sad to see a dilapidated, run-down house. That house was once someone’s pride and joy and it was the scene for for lots of memories, both good and not-so-good.

R.I.P Auto Assault.

Virtually Blind has a very readable interview up with Jason Archinaco, Marc Bragg’s lawyer in the case. For those unsure about the details of the case, I’ve covered it before here and then here.

Not much to comment on from the interview. Bragg’s lawyer says what you’d expect him to say, just as no doubt Linden’s lawyer would say what you’d expect him to say. I find Bragg’s arguments in general to be fairly compelling though. Linden Labs and Philip Rosedale (its CEO) pretty clearly (to my mind at least) misled consumers by repeatedly assuring the public that what you buy in Second Life is, in fact, your property, while now they’ve decided that it’s actually still Linden’s property after all and that they can take it back from you at any time. That the idea of “land” in Second Life as an object to be owned rather than a server to be accessed is fallacious to begin with doesn’t matter much to my not-a-lawyer eyes, especially when Linden made 10s of millions of dollars selling this land until radically false pretenses.

Thus, I find this line of reasoning by Mr. Archinaco to be fairly compelling. He writes, in the interview:

“Let’s say you just assume Bragg’s a bad guy. I don’t think he is, of course, but let’s just assume he is. Who cares? If somebody steals from Wal-mart, can Wal-mart’s security guys come to his house and repossess everything else he bought from them over the years? Of course not. If you have an investment account with Vanguard and there’s a mismarked stock – which happens – where you know it’s worth $50 but it’s listed at $1 and you buy all you can, they’re not going to honor the buys, but they aren’t going to say, “Yeah, we’ll keep that, and we’ll take this other $100,000 you’ve deposited with us too. See you, thanks!” For Linden Lab to point to the Terms of Service and say “Look, we have a forfeiture clause,” well, that clause is outright unlawful.”

In other words, I’m certainly willing to be convinced that Bragg has no right to the land that he “purchased” from Linden using an…unorthodox…method, but Linden seized the rest of his in-game assets as well, and since Linden had been loudly proclaiming to the world for years that what you buy in Second Life is yours I think it’s fairly outrageous for Linden to seize Bragg’s other assets.

I haven’t posted much about Earth Eternal here lately (ok, I haven’t posted all that much lately period) as I don’t want my blog to turn into a promotional device but I think the occasional post is alright. So in that spirit, I wanted to note that we released screenshots of males and females for all our 16 player races late last week.

The feedback we’ve gotten on them has been interesting. In the comments to the article Kotaku did about them, for instance, the screenshots were ripped to pieces and the comments basically turned into people alternatively bashing and defending furries (mainly bashing them). That’s hardly unexpected given the famously harsh Kotaku crowd though. On the other hand, we’ve shown the screenshots to a selection of somewhat random people ranging from 5 year olds to grandmothers, some of whom play games and some of whom don’t, and the reaction has been literally universally positive. Some of that positive reaction can be discounted based on the fact that social etiquette tends to discourage people from telling us they hate something we’ve done to our faces but many of the reactions appeared genuinely enthusiastic. (If only we had the resources to do the kind of user testing Microsoft provides for Bungie…go read this article in Wired about it. Their testing system is awesome.)

What’s kind of interesting about working with anthropomorphized animal characters is that some people see cute and accessible and others see furry, with the subtext being freakish and sick. None of us on the team are into the furry thing and we chose to do anthro characters partly to stand out from the humans/dwarves/elves crowd some and partly because we think humanoid animals are a theme that has a fairly wide appeal. Of course, it’s always possible that we’re right but executing on it poorly such that it won’t matter that we’re right. Or we could just be wrong. I don’t think we are though.

As an aside I’ll also mention that though I’ve not really had any experience with furry culture before announcing EE I’ve got a fair amount of empathy for them now. The hate speech people direct against them is often nearly identical to that which is directed against the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender community and it makes me a little ill and a lot disgusted to read it or hear it. It’s going to be a challenge to come to a policy regarding what I’d consider to be hate speech directed against the furry community and do so in such a way that doesn’t alienate the non-furry players (who will be in the great majority I’m sure) by backing a “sick fetish” (not my words, but a common sentiment among online gamers, sadly).

My preference would be to be as intolerant of hate speech directed at the furry community as we will be regarding racial, sexual, or sexual-preference hate speech but on a practical level I’m unsure if we can do this. From what I’ve seen, many people who are not about to direct hateful statements at hispanics or lesbians have no problem doing the same to furries and I’m not sure we can afford to crack down on it the same way we would on most hate speech. It’ll be a challenge to manage, in any case.

I’ll just say that after a couple hours of play, I’m very impressed. It’s very standard in terms of game-play but it’s executed incredibly well and it’s clear there’s a story I’m likely to be interested in that lies behind everything I’ve encountered so far. I don’t tend to love FPS games all that much and while the mechanics of Bioshock are so far not really different from your standard FPS the wrapping is so lovely that it feels a lot more like a next-gen take on a great adventure game.

I was checking out the website for the new virtual world MyePets, in which players (likely to be largely but not entirely children judging by the promotional material) purchase a physical plushie pet (only dogs seem to be available right now) and then they get to play as their ePet in the virtual world. So far so good and this sort of real/virtual mash-up is only going to become more common in the wake of the success of Webkinz.

There’s not a lot to say about the world except that as I was watching their promotional video I noticed that the game allows you to take your puppy to the soda fountain and purchase “all its favorite treats” for it. And what are it’s favorite treats? Things that can kill it, apparently. Chocolate cake and chocolate chip cookies are featured in the video promo that highlights the soda fountain part of the world.

I don’t want to be too picky but it strikes me that teaching kids that dogs love things that are easily available to children and can kill said kid’s real-life pet is really, really stupid.

From 1up.

This is just cool. It’s a video of a talk at this year’s TED conference (one of the few conferences I’m truly interested in attending…but not $6000 interested) by a very smart fellow named Blaise Aguera y Arcas in which he demonstrates software he (and his team?) have built called Photosynth (link takes you to the demo site for it). The most impressive part of the video, to me, is where Blaise shows how they scraped lots of photos of Notre Dame off Flickr and used those photos to procedurally build a sort of 3d model of Notre Dame. Google Streetview is awesome but it’s very Web 1.0, for lack of a better word. Google sends people out to take photos at street-level of various locations and as a result you can view a city from street level in the places Google chose to send people to.

Photosynth, on the other hand, works from any and all photos, procedurally. Want to reconstruct St. Mark’s Square in Venice? Scrape a couple thousand photos of it from Flickr and you’re off to the races. I’m not sure what the limits of it are but even places that are not frequently photographed could possibly be reconstructed, especially in combination with scene completion technology like this.

This post has not got a lot of purpose besides to publicly confess my habit. Ever since I bought it soon after its release on Feb 20th, Supreme Commander has occupied a little corner of my mind. I have dreamed about unleashing armies of crawling Monkeylords (pictured to the right) or turtling up and building tons of giant Mavor artillery and pounding my unfortunate opponent to bits.

Unfortunately, I think I may have a problem. They say that you know a habit has become a problem when it starts to interfere with the rest of your life. Last night I began a game at 9 pm with my fellow “users” (Chris, Martin, and Rick, I’m looking at you!) and it wasn’t until 2:15 am that Martin and I finished crushing the tenacious forces of Chris and Rick with, yea, Monkeylords, much Tier 3 Artillery, and teleporting Subcommanders. I still had some work to do before going to bed and as a result we postponed our daily 10 am meeting until noon so that we bleary-eyed victims of SupCom’s strategic and tactical brilliance could get our beauty sleep.

I don’t maintain an active top 10 games list but if I did, Supreme Commander and Total Annihilation (its spiritual predecessor from 1997) would both be on it.

From Paidcontent.

They’re paying $350 million up front with incentives that could be worth north of another $350 million.

Massive, massive congratulations to Lane Merrifield, Dave Krysko and Lance Priebe, the three founders who were also the only shareholders in the company. Talk about an amazing indie games success!

Virtually Blind, Benjamin Duranske’s blog focused on law in virtual worlds, has been covering the collapse of a Second Life scam perpetrated by a guy in Sao Paolo named recently that makes for a fun read. It’s best to read the articles in the order he wrote them to follow what went on. I’ll summarize each one briefly as well.

1. Ginko Financial Suspends then Limits Withdrawals; Head ‘Nicholas Portocarrero’ Calls it a “Bank Run,” Tells Depositors to “Calm Down - This is where it begins. Ginko Financial was a “company” in Second Life that let people “deposit” Linden dollars (which may be legitimately traded for real money and are, thus, real, legal assets) and then withdraw them from virtual ATMs. It pitched itself as a bank, but the difference was that it was claiming it would return outrageous rates on your deposits. They were promising .19% daily return on your money (compounded that’s 100% annually!). How could they achieve such an absurdly high rate of return? Clearly, they could not, and were simply funding the returns on initial deposits with the money people deposited later on. A Ponzi scheme, in other words, as noted by The Journal of the Business Law Society at U of Illinois Law College.

   As Benjamin notes in this article, a few days ago Ginko Financial stopped letting people withdraw money altogether and then began limiting their withdrawls to about $19/day, claiming that they had “invested” most of the deposits and couldn’t provide liquidity for their depositors. The head of Ginko, who is so trustworthy he won’t even reveal his actual, real-life name (Benjamin ferreted it out however. It’s Andre Sanchez), advised depositors to ‘calm down.’ After all, when you’re ripping people off you want to do it in peace and quiet. Who wants to listen to a bunch of your scam victims bitching at you? You’ve got free money to spend!

2. Commentary: Ginko Financial is Either a Fraud or Negligently Managed - Benjamin runs the numbers showing that Ginko almost certainly outright lied about its total deposits.
3. Commentary: Ginko Bank Run Update - Day Four - We discover that Andre Sanchez (known as Nicholas Portecarrero in-game) is going to try to do an “IPO” on an in-world “stock market” to cover the deposits. That alone pretty clearly demonstrates that Ginko is/was a Ponzi scheme.
4. Interview with Ginko’s ‘Nicholas Portercarrero’ - Benjamin interviews Andre/Nicholas, who has serious brass balls. He claims that it was an “objective fact” that he could pay depositors 100% annual returns on their investment. How? Why….he’d just pay them out of his own pocket. Yeah, that’s going to scale well. Andre spends the whole interview avoiding giving any answers about anything substantive.
5. Ginko Financial Claims to be Acquiring AVIX - We discover that Ginko wants to IPO in order to….buy the “stock market” it is IPOing on. This is while it can’t even cover a fraction of the deposits it claims its customers have made.
6. Commentary: Ginko Not “Buying” AVIX; IPO Off - It all falls apart. There’s a long chat session transcript with Benjamin, Andre and some other SL people that’s fun to read if only to marvel at the sheer disdain for other people’s money that Andre has. At one point he informs them that even though Ginko wants to “go public” it does not plan on releasing past profit and loss statements.

What baffles me about this is that, say what you will about Second Life, its interface if freaking unfriendly to the average joe and simply figuring out how to use SL and make a deposit with Ginko qualifies you as more tech-savvy, at least, than the average person. I always presumed that the only way the Nigerian scams work (and they apparently do work) is when said Nigerians manage to victimize elderly, half-senile folks. I don’t think that a half-senile person could manage to use Second Life leaving me wondering who the heck had so little common sense as to deposit money into something that was, from the get-go, obviously a scam? There’s something about virtual worlds that seem to make some people check their common sense at the door.

As for Andre, when I worked in the financial industry we had a word for people like him: Criminals. He and his co-conspirators should be prosecuted under applicable banking and securities fraud laws though I don’t expect to see that really happen. There’s still too big of an impenetrable legal cloud around in-world actions for the SEC or whoever the relevant body would be to take action, though I think there’s enough money involved here (several hundred thousand US dollars in claimed “deposits”) that they should. Benjamin is considerably nicer than I am and allows that Andre and his fellow scam artists might just be kids in over their heads but I don’t buy it. They ripped people off, flat-out, in an illegal Ponzi scheme. That’s malicious, not misguided.

(P.S. I’ve got nothing against Brazil. I love your jiu-jitsu!)

It was always pretty clearly illegal under US law and I’m surprised it took this long but Linden Labs has finally banned gambling in Second Life.

Reading the user comments is instructive and two things pop out at me from them.

1. Many users demonstrate a certain hostility to the puritanical culture of the US, blaming it for banning what is legal in many places in the world (as a US citizen who has zero problem with gambling I might point out to them that banning free expression and outlawing things like a swastika because it’s illegal in, say, Germany, is far more offensive to me a ban on gambling. The right to be a fool and throw away your money rates a lot lower than the right to express yourself on my personal scale of important freedoms.) Comments include, “The USA’s Christian Taliban wins again!” and, “Move your servers to Europe. This is absolutely ridiculous.“
2. Many users are unable or unwilling to distinguish between activities they are actually engaging in, such as gambling, and activities they are just pretending to be engaging in, such as prostitution. Comments include, “What’s the difference between escorts and gambling? It’s real money being used, you’re very naive if you think escorts aren’t next,” (Uh, yeah, who is being naive here?) and, “I wonder if the next hit will be on us escorts, put that prostitution is, too, illegal in the USA.”

There were some supportive comments as well, generally pointing out that Linden has no practical choice in the matter. Moving to the Isle of Man or whatnot is hardly worth it when a ban on gambling isn’t a game-ender for Second Life.

The release of the last Harry Potter book and the assured success of it (12 million books were printed for the US alone) got me to thinking about return on investment. Specifically, the return on JK Rowling’s investment (of labor/time), which has to be among the highest in the history of creative enterprises. Let’s look at some rough numbers.

• Harry Potter books have sold 325 million copies worldwide, making JK Rowling a billionaire and the wealthiest author in the history of literature. I don’t know what the average price/book is but let’s be conservative and say $10. Amazon sells the hardback for $18 as a point of reference and the MSRP is $34.99, but I doubt anyone is actually paying that price unless they’re buying it in an airport bookstore or whatnot. Paperback sales also cut into the average price quite a bit, so I think $10/copy is probably within the realm of reason. That’s $3.25 billion from the book sales alone (all of which is certainly not going to JK Rowling, lest anyone think I am implying that).
• JK Rowling spent 17 years writing the 7 book series. I doubt she put in the equivalent of steady 40 hour work weeks writing during that entire 17 years (I’ve never met an author who can legitimately claim to productively write 40 hours a week year in year out) but let’s be generous and say that 17 man-years of work went into the development and production (not including printing, marketing, and distribution) of the HP books.
• World of Warcraft cost, I believe, somewhere between 70 and 80 million to develop (not including manufacturing, marketing, and distribution) and had a team of upwards of 100 people. The current dev team for WoW is 135 people according to Gamasutra. I’m not sure when development on WoW started but given that Blizzard first announced WoW in 2001 at ECTS (European Computer Trade Show) and had gameplay footage there and at E3 that year it must have started development in 1999, at least. It’s likely that the WoW team size averaged at least 80 people on average for 5 years, or 400 man-years of work, at minimum.
• I’m willing to bet large amounts of money that the average person working on WoW did in fact work at least 40 hours a week, so even while comparing oranges to apples it seems certain that WoW cost at least 20x the amount of labor that Harry Potter did. I suspect the real figure (factoring in the amount of work done rather than just the (amount of time from start to finish*average number of workers) is more like 50-75x as much.

That means that if we just look at the book sales for Harry Potter (merchandising is easily 1-1.5 billion/year and then there are the movies, each of which has done very well) in terms of return per hour, they have earned about (using my very very rough estimates) $191 million for every man-year of labor put into them.

For WoW to hit such a ratio it would have to produce, in total, $76 billion (and again that’s without including HP merchandising, which certainly dwarfs WoW’s, or the HP movies). Currently, WoW brings in about $650-700 million/year plus box sales, which have added a few hundred million to the subscription and Asian net cafe figures. In other words, WoW would have to run for about 100 years at the current activity level to match the revenue/man-year from the Harry Potter books alone. (And of course given that a dollar today is worth a lot more than even an inflation-adjusted dollar in the future, the real answer is that WoW would have to run a lot longer than that to give the same return.)

Disclaimer again: Many of these numbers are estimates. Informed estimates, but still estimates. I’m also comparing apples and oranges to a large extent since WoW has enormous support costs that Harry Potter does not have, but similarly WoW has enormous recurring income that Harry Potter books do not have (though Harry Potter merchandise and the movies probably more than make up for that).

Richard Bartle recently named the five people he thought were the most influential in the history of virtual worlds. I’m in no position to argue with Richard and think his list is pretty darn good anyway.

Then I started thinking about who would be on that list were it confined to the most influential people currently, and I came up with this list. It’s woefully inadequate as I simply don’t know as much about the Asian market as I do about the Western market. In no particular order, except for Rob Pardo as first:

• Rob Pardo. VP of Game Design at Blizzard. Lead mind behind WoW’s polished excellence. Time Magazine named him one of their 100 most influential people in the world due to the 6 million then players (8.5 million now) that call it hobby or habit.
• Timo Soininen. CEO of Sulake, creator of both Habbo (there are individual websites for something like 19 regions, so the .com is just for the US, explaining their not-particularly-high Alexa rank on the .com site) and Disney’s Virtual Magic Kingdom. Habbo is one of the most popular virtual worlds in existence, with something like 8 million unique monthly players. They continue to grow
• Jun Zhu. CEO of The9 (Not an English site, sorry.) The9 is the publisher of World of Warcraft in China as well as MU, Ragnarok 2 Online, Guild Wars, Granado Espada, and other games. China is is easily going to surpass the US in internet users and they are, like the South Koreans, absolutely mad for online games. Jun Zhu seems to have his finger on the pulse of the Chinese online gaming culture.
• Andrew Gower. The founder and driver of Runescape. His game is more popular in the US and Europe than World of Warcraft. 7 million players can’t be wrong.
  

I promised five people but the truth is that I can’t decide whom the fifth should be. I’m almost positive it should be someone in Asia but I just don’t find myself connected enough to what’s going on over there. There is a very large cultural divide even now, exacerbated by the fact that so few of us speak Korean or any of the Chinese dialects. Richard put Jake Song on his list, which I completely agree with, but Jake left NCSoft to do his own thing and has yet to prove his relevance to the right now.

Richard opined that Philip Rosedale (CEO of Linden Labs, which develops Second Life) could be on the kind of list I’m giving but I’m looking mainly at how many people’s lives have been significantly affected and Second Life is not one of the major virtual worlds there despite the media attention. Having said that, were this a list of the top 10, Philip would be in there, as would Lane Merrifield, the CEO of New Horizons Interactive, developer/publisher of the immensely popular Club Penguin, as well as Matt Bostwick, Senior VP of Franchise Development at MTV, where they have released something like five or six virtual worlds in the last year, backed by big money and big brands.

Who would you put on there, particularly from Asia?

Richard has an interview with the Guardian that’s worth reading, especially for his response to the question, “If you could take control of one major MMORPG, which would you choose and what would you do with it?” His answer?

“I’d take over World of Warcraft and I’d close it. I just want better virtual worlds. Sacrificing one of the best so its players have to seek out alternatives would be a sure-fire way to ensure that unknown gems got the chance they deserved, and that new games were developed to push back the boundaries. Er, I would get to do this anonymously, wouldn’t I?”

See? What the hell are you thinking, Richard? Think it, don’t say it! I’m pretty sure that some of those 8.5 million people can find out where you sleep. Doing it anonymously would be no good as we all know that you can’t hide information from MMO players. They will ferret out that it was you and then you’ll find yourself on the receiving end of the mother of all gankings as Millenium and Nihilum team up to find out what your drops are.

Gamasutra has a short interview with Frank Pearce at Blizzard. Most depressing, humbling, and downright scary fact: Their cinematics team alone has 85 developers.

Time names it one of the five places on the internet to avoid. That’s a little ridiculous but considering that the other sites Time thinks should be avoided are MySpace, Evite, eHarmony, and the ever-irritating Meez, at least Linden can feel pleased that SL is listed alongside companies that have done things like managed to actually turn a profit.

This part me made chuckle and sigh at the same time:

“Fans praise Second Life as a virtual hangout where you can meet and chat and buy sneakers and real estate (that’s fake stuff for real money) and dance and go bowling and have sex — suggesting that “virtual humans” doing “human things” online in Second Life is somehow less pathetic than, say, cooking Kaldorei spider kabobs or making magic pantaloons in World of Warcraft.”

I don’t like the implication that doing things virtually is pathetic, at all, but at least Time recognizes that there’s nothing inherently more pathetic about moving some bits around and calling it “spider kabob cooking” than there is about moving some bits around and calling it “virtual bowling” or “virtual lapdancing.”

There’s also an article from July 9th in AdAge entitled, “Second Life Losing Lock on Virtual-Site Marketing” subtitled, “As Users and Brands Head to Startups, Giant in Space Starts to Seem Outdated.”

Here’s the report. Note that the report only measures visits to websites so people playing games with a desktop client like WoW aren’t counted in it unless they visited the website (which I’d imagine a decent percentage of users do, but certainly not all).

Edit: Steven Davis dissects the numbers and comes up rightfully skeptical.

Gamasutra is reporting that the new GamerMetrics report from IGN Entertainment is out and that they predict that three games (Halo 3, Madden 07, and Grand Theft Auto IV) will account for 30% of game sales in 2007 all by themselves. 30%!!

When someone pointed me to this (thanks Martin!) I thought it was a joke. Even after watching the video (included below) I thought it was just a piece mocking the “We read Snow Crash too many times and are building the Metaverse!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” crowd. But no. It is not a joke. Watch the trailer before you read any further.

Yes, that’s right, you too can lower your efficiency by a factor of approximately 1000% by reading your email in a 3d environment in which spam is represented by fat slimy guys and your good mail by starlets. You too can “feed your spam to the sharks” and “hang out with your email!”

Remember people, as the video says, “One name spells entertainment. One name spells excitement. One name spells email. That name is 3d Mailbox. Go where no email has gone before!”

When I think of the one name that spells email, I just think of ‘email’ but I’m glad to see that there are people out there for whom that kind of practicality takes a back seat to letting your email take a cool, disinfecting shower.

One of the blogs I read now and then is Fargo’s Fileblog (part of Fileplanet/Gamespy). Last week Fargo wrote an article about Korea’s recent decision to add a specific value-added tax on RMT transactions for entities/individuals doing more than about $6500/year. I wanted to clarify a couple issues so sent in an email, which Fargo’s re-printed. I wouldn’t normally reprint a blog entry but since it’s my email anyway I thought I’d post the letter here. Perhaps someone can correct me somewhere, or perhaps it’ll just be useful to some of you in clarifying your thinking about taxation of virtual assets. Hope it’s helpful in any case, though I’ll take pains once again to mention that I’m not a lawyer or a tax pro of any sort.

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A month ago I blogged about what is shaping up to be an interesting virtual world law case between an ex-Second Life user (Bragg) and Linden Labs (SL’s developer). I summarize the case at the very bottom of the post if you’re not familiar with it. That post talked about Judge Robreno’s ruling that he was declaring part of Linden’s ToS invalid, among other things. Linden has now filed its response to Bragg’s claims, as well as its counterclaims (they are suing Bragg now). You can find the court filing here.

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My friend Dave IM’d me earlier asking, “Are you ready to feel old? I can do it in a single link.”

http://www.paxtonland.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/baby-on-nevermind-album-cover.JPG

Sigh. I hate you, Dave.

I dislike the term “serious games,” which implies that there is something that isn’t serious about, say, WoW. I’ll go ahead and suggest that a service that brings in ~$700 million/year in revenue and provides thousands of jobs (both within Blizzard and in multiple gold-generating operations) is a lot more serious than any game that has, to date, been produced with a purpose other than entertainment. In fact, I’m just going to refer to them as Alternative Purpose Games (APGs) until I grow tired of having to explain what I mean every time I use the term. I think APG sums them up much more clearly than ‘Serious’ does when trying to distinguish between games whose purpose is entertainment and games whose purpose is something else.

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Anarchy Online has become the latest MMO to add virtual item sales. That’s all. Just thought it was interesting. (Related note: Funcom just raised another $30 million.)

Adobe has a piece up about Sherwood RPG, a 3d MMO that runs in Shockwave (a web browser extension if you’re not familiar with it). Sherwood garners 1.4 million unique visitors a month, is completely free, and is ad-supported. It also takes about 30 seconds from clicking ‘Play Now’ to getting into the play experience, if you have Shockwave installed (I have heard Shockwave has about 55% penetration in the US market).

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A few people have asked where I am today and why I’m not at the Virtual Goods Summit. My apologies if you were looking for me. Something came up this morning that required my attention and by the time it was sorted out there was only one session left I could have made it to, which isn’t worth the hour drive each way.

I hope it was a great conference, and thanks to Charles and Susan for putting it on. I look forward to watching the video of it.

Neopets, an online environment in which users raise virtual pets, has announced that it will begin to sell virtual items to its users. For those who have somehow avoided Neopets, know that it’s one of the most popular online games in the world, with more monthly users (12 million) than WoW, Runescape, Habbo, and so on. It’s not a virtual world but it certainly competes with some of the ones aimed at tweens.

Players will purchase “Neocash” with real money (the equivalent of the “credits” that we sell), and that currency will co-exist with “Neopoints” which is the currency earned in-game by completing tasks and playing mini-games. Interestingly, Neopets has opted not to allow players to trade Neopoints for Neocash, which makes little sense that I can see. By allowing players to trade Neopoints for Neocash, demand for Neocash would increase significantly, since you’re tapping into a greater demand by allowing that trade to happen.
Via Playnoevil.

10 years ago, Iron Realms (with me as its sole employee!) pioneered the “sale” of virtual assets in our first MMO - Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands. I always say pioneered rather than invented because the nature of virtual items is fuzzy (money is effectively virtual…do mortgage companies essentially sell virtual items by giving out loans?) and because even in the context of virtual worlds I’m fairly sure that it had happened on an isolated basis here or there before Achaea did it. On the other hand we are, as far as I know, the first company to ever build a business model around it. We were also, I’m fairly sure, the first virtual world to offer an in-world currency exchange allowing players to trade gold (earned in-game) for credits (purchased with real money) and thus play a commercial game for free, forever.

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As I write this I’m in the midst of a game of Settlers on Xbox Live Arcade. I’ve played Settlers maybe ten times or so as a board game, but in the past week I’ve played probably 30 games via XBLA.

I suck. I don’t quite understand why as I’m typically reasonably good at turn-based strategy games, but Eileen and I have something like a 1-20 record. Granted, since the ranked games involve four players, the average record should be 5-15, but 1-20 is a long way from that! I can write off a couple games with the excuse that I was trying to write some of Earth Eternal’s history while playing, but that’s only four or five of those games.

I despair! But damn it, I will win.

I loved this quote from a Forbes article talking about how dubious the value proposition is for outside businesses in Second Life.  It’s from the creative director of Wells Fargo’s digital marketing agency.

“Going into Second Life now is the equivalent of running a field marketing program in Iraq.”

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As I posted last month, Club Penguin (one of the largest virtual worlds/MMOs around, focusing on kids) was in talks with Sony for acquisition at half a billion. According to paidContent, the deal is off. The Club Penguin folks were asking for upwards of half a billion, and Sony was offering $450 million or so. There were also some issues, apparently, with user churn and the insistence on the Club Penguin side that CP continue to donate a portion of profits to charity.

Club Penguin is a self-funded company as far as I know and while they’re doing about $30 million/year in profits or so, I can’t help but want to slap them and say 450 MILLION DOLLARS! If they’re that concerned with charity (and good for them if so!), take the money and give a hundred million to charity right now. We can all hope to have such dilemmas.

Sparter has launched its player-to-player virtual currency trading exchange today. It’s not the first P2P virtual currency exchange (playerauctions.com has been around for nearly a decade I believe) but it’s certainly the most high-profile one to launch and it’s got VC backing from Bessemer Venture Partners, a top-tier firm.

I’m curious how much it will be P2P and how much it will really be a clearing house for other virtual currency brokers like IGE and MOGS.com.

It’s no secret that Linden Labs (developer of Second Life) is experiencing a lot of bad PR these days. I’m not going to bother to look up the articles, but just Google yourself up “Second Life child porn”. Presumably in order to try and run damage control, Linden has angered a good portion of its userbase by instituting new rules that prohibit some types of violent and sexual content (that are legal in in the US, but not in, say, Germany).

Last night I was chatting with a friend who was in a call on Friday with a group looking to make social virtual world experiences for a number of prominent real-life brands. What was interesting was that my friend said that the group had rejected Second Life out of hand because the bad PR around it wasn’t something they wanted to be tainted with.

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If you’ve not seen the announcement that Lego’s MMO will be called Lego Universe, here it is!

I don’t know why, especially given that few concrete details about it have been released that just sounds like fun. Kotaku opines that this could be the next big MMO and I’m tempted to agree, though it’s a long ways between now and Q4 2008.

EVE Online has an image problem and possibly an actual corruption problem (though I’m not entirely convinced). For those of you following the story, you can find a summary of all the relevant details here. Corruption by admin staff is nearly as old as MMOs and there’s nothing new or particularly interesting about the EVE corruption scandal unless you are an avid player of EVE.

What IS interesting is CCP’s response (detailed in the same article above). They’re setting up a player-run task force to supposedly oversee the games’ development and will go so far as to fly the players on that task force to Iceland (where they are headquartered) regularly to…..Well, to do what, I don’t know. As Raph points out, the idea of flying some people out to walk around an office and magically detect corruption is a bit silly. I don’t mean to sound overly cynical, and I’m sure CCP has the best of intentions, but it’s pretty clearly an empty PR exercise designed to make the player representatives feel important, feel included in some sort of inner circle, and thus be pre-disposed to saying nice things about CCP.

The quote that caught me and made me go “ugh” though was this one, from Hilmar Petursson, CCP’s top exec (who generally rocks). He said,

“Eve Online is not a computer game. It is an emerging nation, and we have to address it like a nation being accused of corruption.”

I don’t know whether he was really serious when he said this or if it was an off-the-cuff remark but it is a nonsensical assertion.

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I have been remiss in not mentioning how much the DS game Puzzle Quest contributed to downtime on our recent vacation. For those of you who haven’t played it, Puzzle Quest is a lite-fantasy RPG wrapped around a battle mechanic that is essentially Bejeweled with some variations. It’s insanely addictive, and Eileen got her puzzle on considerably more frequently than I did. I don’t care for match-3 games normally but the added leveling up, earning gold, getting better equipment, finding runes, and so on creates a context (it’s always about context!) in which there’s enough added meaning that the games become fun.

Puzzle Quest might be the perfect airplane game.

I don’t post about food very often, but it’s one of the great joys in my life and I’ve written a few times about it before. Last week I happened to have an appetizer at what amounts to my local diner, and it was both delicious and well-presented. It was a take on insalata caprese, which is a salad of basil, tomato, and mozzarella. In this case, however, watermelon was used, and then the salad was drizzled with balsamic vinegar. Hadn’t seen that before but it was delicious. I decided to re-create it at home a couple nights later, and these are the results.

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I’ve posted a bunch of pictures on Flickr from the trip Eileen and I recently took to French Polynesia in the sunny south Pacific for those interested. Gorgeous places there I have to say, but the food is so mediocre as to make one want to weep. We lived on trail mix and energy bars on Tikehau, where there is only one restaurant (very overpriced, very blah), but there is nothing like places so far away from the rest of humanity as to feel almost a different planet. Highlight of the trip was definitely the diving. We did eight dives, and saw all sorts of things, including dozens of sharks (some 10 foot+), turtles, eagle rays, spotted eels, lionfish, huge Napoleon fish, and so on.

The only thing that sucks about flying to go experience nature is knowing that flying on a jet airplane is just about the most environmentally irresponsible act an individual can commit. Oh well. If we’re going to fuck up the environment, I just want to enjoy relatively undisturbed bits before it all goes pear-shaped I guess. How selfish of me.

This is an amazing day for virtual worlds legally. First the Bragg vs. Linden order basically cutting down Linden’s ToS. Now we have a class action suit brought by a player of WoW against IGE for encourging gold-farming. You can find the order here, helpfully posted on Terranova: http://terranova.blogs.com/ige-classaction.pdf

The claim is that IGE encourages actions that substantially impair the enjoyment of the plaintiffs. Scanning this, it reads like someone bitching on a forum, not a serious lawsuit, but I’m not a lawyer. It’s not nearly as interesting as the Bragg vs. Linden order but it’s still a fun read.

Makes me wonder if the plaintiff planned to sue before Affinity Media sold IGE a little while ago. Raph has comments on this as well.

I’m just reading the latest in the Bragg vs. Linden case. I didn’t realize that Bragg was also including Philip Rosedale personally in the suit. Apparently Philip filed a motion to dismiss based on lack of jurisdiction, and Linden filed to compel arbitration but the judge has denied them both. This has incredible implications for the Terms of Service of virtual worlds, and I bet there is a lot of concern over at Linden right now.

Apparently, in order to have personal jurisdiction over Rosedale, the court needed proof that Rosedale interacted substantially with the forum that the court has jurisdiction over. In this case, that’s eastern Pennsylvania. Judge Robreno ruled that the fact that Rosedale had personally engaged in a national effort to induce people to buy property in Second Life and even made himself available for interaction via his avatar in SL (Bragg claims to have been at a “town meeting” style meeting in which Rosedale talked about buying land) together come together to create sufficient action within the forum/state such that the court can have personal jurisdiction over Rosedale.

I’ll admit that I don’t spend my days reading court cases for the most part so perhaps this isn’t odd but the way I read it, the judge sounds very hostile to Rosedale and Linden. He writes, of Rosedale,

“He was the hawker sitting outside the circus tent, singing the marvels of what was contained inside to entice customers to enter.” Ouch. Rings a bit true though.

The arbitration bit is also interesting. Agreeing to arbitration is part of the Terms of Service for using Second Life, and Bragg admits he clicked ‘accept’ on the ToS screen before accessing SL. The judge launches into an attack on multiple parts of Linden’s ToS, saying that they represent a contract of adhesion by virtue of the one-sidedness, the inability to negotiate an alternative with Linden Labs, and the fact that Linden’s ToS says arbitration only for the customer, but that Linden can ban people at any time, for any reason (that is effectively what virtually every ToS for every MMO says).

(At that point, I started getting a little scared as a virtual world operator but Judge Robreno does mention a couple times that Second Life is distinct from most other virtual worlds in that it explicitly tells people they can make money with the service and that they own the things in the service.)

His conclusion regarding the arbitration clause in the ToS reads:

“When a dispute arises in Second Life, Linden is not obligated to initiate arbitration. Rather, the TOS expressly allows Linden, at its “sole discretion” and based on mere “suspicion,” to unilaterally freeze a participant’s account, refuse access to the virtual and real currency contained within that account, and then confiscate the participant’s virtual property and real estate. A participant wishing to resolve any dispute, on the other hand, after having forfeited its interest in Second Life, must then initiate arbitration in Linden’s place of business. To initiate arbitration involves advancing fees to pay for no less than three arbitrators at a cost far greater than would be involved in litigating in the state or federal court system. Moreover, under these circumstances, the confidentiality of the proceedings helps ensure that arbitration itself is fought on an uneven field by ensuring that, through the accumulation of experience, Linden becomes an expert in litigating the terms of the TOS, while plaintiffs remain novices without the benefit of learning from past precedent.

Taken together, the lack of mutuality, the costs of arbitration, the forum selection clause, and the confidentiality provision that Linden unilaterally imposes through the TOS demonstrate that the arbitration clause is not designed to provide Second Life participants an effective means of resolving disputes with Linden. Rather, it is a one-sided means which tiles unfairly, in almost all situations, in Linden’s favor. As in Comb, through the use of an arbitration clause, Linden “appears to be attempting to insulate itself contractually from any meaningful challenge to its alleged practices.”

The Judge allows that the fact that Bragg is himself an experienced attorney mitigates the concerns with procedural unconscionability somewhat but writes that “because the unilateral modification clause renders the arbitration provision severely one-sided in the substantive dimension, even moderate procedural unconscionability renders the arbitration agreement unenforceable.”

So there we have it. The ToS is not a holy document in Second Life and it is hardly a stretch to say that much of the same logic can be applied to the ToS of many virtual worlds. I just hope that whoever hears the next case on a ToS is going to be willing to make a distinction between worlds offered for entertainment and worlds in which people can make investments into (which should and will be regulated). I can’t help but feel that this is an extremely important ruling for virtual worlds (for good or ill depending on your point of view, most likely), and the case hasn’t even really begun yet.

Edit: Raph has blogged about it too.

Holy shit….

TechCrunch reports that Sony is in talks with Club Penguin to buy the latter for upwards of half a billion! The article says 500,000 active users but I know that’s low by at least a factor of two, $65 million in annual revenue and $35 million in annual profit. Those numbers make half a billion seem almost reasonable. That’d be a P/E ratio (price/earnings) of about 14, which is not outrageous at all for a growing company.

I know Jagex (creator of Runescape) has turned down offers exceeding $100 million, which I thought was a bit insane when I heard it (from the would-be buyer) and it is clear now that they were probably right to do so.

I’m unplugging this evening until the 29th of May and heading on a dream vacation with Eileen (but not poor Nixon, who will be despondent at our absence) to French Polynesia in the South Pacific. Specifically, the island of Tikehau (with a whopping 400 people on it and not a single car) in the Tuamotu Archipelago and then Bora Bora in the Society Islands. I am heartened to note that Tikehau is far enough off the beaten path to lack an entry in Wikipedia, though oddly its airport has a one-line entry. Bora Bora is also in the middle of nowhere but is a major south seas tourist destination (for good reason…that’s a picture of Bora Bora below). I plan on spending the 11 days scuba diving, snorkeling, windsurfing and reading, and generally staying as far away from the internet as possible.

One of the reasons I’m quite excited to go is that, worldwide, coral is dying off at an alarming pace due to a variety of factors (all likely caused by man) from global warming to pollution in the oceans. A few years ago a comprehensive study of coral in the Caribbean was released showing that about 80% of the Caribbean’s coral had died off in the last three decades, for instance. Last time I was in that part of the world (on St. Martin/St. Maarten) I saw huge regions of dead coral when diving and snorkeling. The South Pacific has managed to stay relatively untouched by these phenomena at this point, though Tikehau is likely to be wiped off the face of the earth within 100 years by rising oceans (unlike Bora Bora below, Tikehau is very flat and very susceptible to rising waters).

We released the first video for Earth Eternal today! It shows three of our NPCs (Dragon, Treekin, Shroomie) and a Feline (one of our sixteen player races) geared up for battle. It all takes place in a test area and shadows are off so don’t be too harsh on the environment, which isn’t the point in the video. We just hope this gives a sense of the ‘flavor’ that EE’s characters will have.

There is a movement (of uncertain size) in Belgium that’s putting for “candidates” for June 10th elections. I put quotes around the word because a vote for the NEE party is a vote to leave that parliament seat empty. It’s a protest vote against the government, essentially, saying, “All the real candidates suck.” I’ve long wished for a “None of the above” option in American elections, as that’s usually what I’d choose given the choice.

Anyway, there’s a hot female “candidate” for the NEE party that is offering 40,000 blowjobs, to be delivered with physically or in Second Life. The funniest part are the terms of service. They include,

“any attempt to influence the depth of insertion by the user will result in immediate end of service”

along with

“Services for female applicants can only be provided in Second Life if the applicant has the necessary avatar modifications“

Sigh.

Summary: A school in Texas has been expelled from his school for playing a Counterstrike mod that took place in a modeled version of his school. Coincidence that he’s Asian and this was so close to the shootings at Virginia Tech? Perhaps.

The police even searched the kid’s home, with consent. What’d they find? A hammer. Clearly, a terrorist. No charges were filed but the school is still refusing to let the poor kid attend graduation ceremonies with his classmates.

Someday I hope to have enough money to tweak the nose of jackasses like the school administrators there. My first reaction to reading this story was to be filled with a desire to pay people to create Counterstrike models of every school in that school district and then offer them up for download. Perhaps locate the blueprints for the houses of the individual administrators and do the same thing for their homes.

I’m not a fucking terrorist because I’ll be playing Spiderman 3 next week (takes place in a virtual NYC) and neither are the developers. This kid isn’t a terrorist and he should be praised for his creative efforts not expelled from school. I hope his parents sue the living hell out of the school district.

A handful of hours ago, the users of Digg collectively revolted, as reported by Mashable in a series of posts this evening. A story containing an encryption key for HD-DVD had been published on the site by a user but Digg received a cease-and-desist from, I gather, a powerful consortium called the AACS saying, presumably, that under the DMCA they need to take that key down. Digg did so, but another user submitted another story about the key. Digg took that down too.

And then all hell broke loose. Users of Digg collectively revolted against the management and posted the number millions of times across the site. At one point, every story going back five pages was apparently there to spread the encryption key. Digg’s servers also reportedly had trouble keeping up with the assault the users were giving them.

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Yes, sadly, like everyone else we’re not going to make our original release date. We were aiming for a late summer open beta but instead we’re looking at a late fall open beta I think. It’s never fun to go over budget but my god is it worth it. If you had showed us a year ago what Earth Eternal was going to look like in terms of our tech (which is the main hold-up) we would have told you you’re smoking crack. We were aiming for “one step above Runescape” but have blown way, way past that target.

We told ourselves in the beginning that the #1 rule we would follow would be never to let the quality bar rise (as raising it costs money and we’re on a tight budget) but that is really hard to avoid doing if you’ve got any passion for what you’re creating, and so it’s happened in spades. Thank goodness we let it happen as though it’s costing us extra raising that bar is really looking like it’s going to be worth it.

Stomping down on feature/quality creep is truly difficult I have to say. Every day we find something new we can do with the platform we’re building but at this point we have to just grit our teeth and file the idea away in the “sometime post-release” category.

I can’t wait until I can post screenshots openly. In the meantime if you want you can search the ‘Game Design’ section of the Earth Eternal forums at for some prototype shots.

This is interesting stuff. Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals talks, fairly off-handedly, about issues involving virtual worlds. What’s troublesome to me is that Judge Kozinski has a reputation for being a tech-savvy judge, but he’s clearly got very little clue about virtual worlds. Still, I have to say I’m impressed by the fact that he’s apparently engaged in RMT on behalf of his kids, without having any clear conception of what it was he was buying or selling.
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Brian Green has a post up asking “How Low Can You Go?” talking about the minimum amount it takes to make an MMORPG. He’s commenting on a post on a very new blog that claims a new MMORPG (that isn’t trying to compete with the giants) could be made for $2 million and take 2 years doing it. Brian raises the stakes and claims it would take $3-$3.5 million, though he allows that some savings could be made by trading equity for salary.

Note: Brian has since clarified that he’s not asserting it would take 3-3.5 million to make a moderately successful MMORPG. He was asserting that it would take 3-3.5 million to make an MMORPG with the salary figures that the author of MOGBlog was giving. I’m going to leave the post up anyway though as I have little doubt many out there do think it takes millions to turn out an MMORPG.
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