T=Machine

Yahoo recently posted a page listing and describing eight different design patterns for a reputation (or ranking, or achievement) system for a community - where community could be a web community, the players of a particular game, etc. For a long time now, I’ve been meaning to write a post on this stuff, and this finally poked me to do it…

EDIT: It’s Bryce, not Bruce. Argh. Sorry, Bryce - I was thinking about Bruce Schneier at the time, I think.

(thanks to Jeremy Liew for posting about an interview with the guy behind it, Yahoo’s Bruce Glass, which looks at some of the thinking behind it and his own views on what to do and what not to do)

Reputation systems - why?

For most game developers - and moreso most game publishers - the answer is “look at XBLA” (Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade). In the past 2 years, MS has put out a series of press releases and marketing pimping up the large amounts of money that they - and the publishers - have been making off the additional sales generated by this simple achievements/reputation system.

(I think that’s great, but also a bit sad, because XBLA does some other equally special stuff that hasn’t had quite so much explicit attention. Who’s talking about the GamerCard, and what *that* means for online communities? Plenty of people have, but it’s not achieved quite the same amount of attention. I think a lot of people have dismissed it as a gimmick in comparison to the reputation system - which is foolish of them, because the GC provides an excellent way for players to spread their Online Identity, and identity is a much bigger pie to be taking slices of than reptuation systems ever will be. But it’s harder to work with, and I’ll come back to that in another post sometime in the future.)

Or, as Joshua Porter puts it in the Bruce Glass interview:

“Reputation systems have driven the entire business at eBay.com, much of the business at Amazon.com, drives activity at Digg.com, powers the moderation system at Slashdot, etc…and yet for all the millions of words written about web design very few of them have been dedicated to this type of software.”

Choosing a rewards system

As an online game and MMO developer, and someone who focusses on social gaming and how to integrate it with mainstream games design, I’d say that the answer to “which form of reputation system for your social game?” is simply and clearly “all of them”. And at first I thought that was just me.

I’ve worked on games that have had a heavy social/web element, and adding additional parallel rewards/reputation systems has only ever helped both the community and the game. Nowadays, everything I see reinforces this, at least for games.

For instance, easy example - look at Kongregate. Kong has 5 independent, parallel rating systems for each game, and 7 (!) reputation systems for each user/player/developer on the site.

Looking at how those interact with each other, I would argue that a lot of the site’s success is precisely because it has these multiple *independent* forms of valuing user content; it allows you as a member of the community to say “this is nothing special in many ways, but in one aspect it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen” - essentially allowing for a multi-dimensional measure of “goodness”.

So, although I understand and by default agree with Y!’s suggestion that you should look at your community, assess your target market and your product aims, and pick one reputation system, I feel that you really shouldn’t do that with games.

Why one is never enough

Because only having one:

• Limits self-expression: you CHOOSE to invest of yourself in various ways in a community. Bruce Glass mentions this. He doesn’t mention the knock-on implication: what you choose to invest says something about who you are and how you wish to be perceived. So, this is a part of your personal online identity.you can only be good at one thing, not a set of things, and there’s no way to show
• Reduces learning opportunities: with multiple rep systems, a community can let a member know that “we think you are really awful at some things, but really good at others. Please do less of the bad stuff”, instead of just “we don’t value you”
• Prevents the majority of people from being recognized: Go read about the Bartle types. Then read Erik Bethke’s presentations on what happened when he thought that some of them “didn’t apply” to his own MMO, GoPets, and what happened when he changed his mind on that. There is no MMO without all four player-types represented. One rep system can only satisfy one quarter of the traits that are present in all your audience. It may be the largest represented quarter, but it’s still artificially limiting your appeal as a game/product/experience/community
• Assumes you actually know - and can control - what your community is, what it will become, and how it will grow to get there. That’s usually not the case. It seems (at least in MMO and online games) that good community management these days is not directive, it’s reactive. That’s not an excuse to abrogate responsibility for encouraging and supporting your community, it’s just saying that you need to give them more opportunity to tell you what they want, so that you can then modify your offering. And they will change what they want, they don’t remain static

And after saying all that, I wonder: how much of this is games-centric? Because although I’m no expert on online communities in general, that sounds pretty applicable to a wider set of online properties - not all, I’m sure, but many more than just “games”.

Which leads me to wonder whether the suggestion itself (that you should carefully choose just one) is a nice idea in theory, but perhaps not appropriate in the modern web world: perhaps communities now are sufficiently savvy, picky, and accustomed to being the ones to control success (e.g. youtube, where the community makes a video successful, not the site owners), that single-value measures of reputation are no longer what your community wants and needs.

Maybe?

And as for Kongregate … well, now I’m going to finally write up the post I’ve been meaning to for a long time about that.

Filed under : computer games, games design, massively multiplayer, web 2.0
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Or so this blog on security says.

“Some experts claim that two-factor authentication won’t work. They are wrong, of course.”

The expert linked to is Bruce Schneier, and the main attack he points out that isn’t affected by TFS is … fake website asking for your credentials.

Funny. That was one of the main ways of stealing people’s MMO player accounts when I first got into MMO dev around ten years ago. And it’s still one of the main ways now (although there are plenty of other good ones, as noted in the linked post). It’s just … so easy!

Which would suggest that yes, actually, Bruce is right: TFS is going to do little to combat the *actual problems* being faced here.

Personally, I’ve always been on the side of security is pretty simple really: prevention is impossible, and anything that claims to provide great prevention is snake oil, and the reason security in practice is hard is because you have to find ways to deal with detection and response, and *that’s* where all the interesting stuff is.

On the other hand, I’ve now heard a couple of people suggest that the one-time-passwords thing from Blizzard isn’t about the passwords anyway: it’s about reducing credit-card chargebacks by shipping goods to the actual address first. In a way, it’s a basic form of TFS on the act of issuing a CC charge: you have to know the CC details and be able to intercept snailmail post, and until you succeed at both, the company doesn’t need to issue the CC charge.

Again … prevention? Nah, I can still intercept post, even on a large scale. But … detecting that interception is going to be somewhat easier, and responding to it (getting people fired from FedEx, or whichever company has been infiltrated and/or has a dodgy employee that’s been fired) is probably a lot easier than dealing with an unknown anonymous person from “somewhere” on the planet who bought 10,000 CC’s on the black market.

So, props to Blizzard. But not for making “a better form of password”. And a thumbs-down to Errata Security: sorry, but I’m not convinced by your analysis. I see what you’re saying, but I suspect you’re barking up the wrong tree. And I’m afraid I’m always suspicious of people who defend any preventative measure too closely - security doesn’t seem to work like that, sadly.

Filed under : computer games, games industry, massively multiplayer, networking, security

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So, here’s a question for Agile developers: when you’re using Scrum as your development process, and your game is in pre-production, at what point do you move to Production? And, more importantly, how can you tell (that you’ve moved)? Is Scrum in fact a permanent Pre-Production, right up until the moment you launch? And if that’s the case, how do you explain THAT to your publisher?

Traditional process

There are three stages: Concept, Pre-Production, and Production. Every game goes through those processes in that order. Typically the number of staff working on the project (and hence the amount of money being spent - and the risk being taken on!) goes up by a large factor from stage to stage.

Rather than bore you senseless here if you already know all this, I’ve written up a slightly more detailed explanation of games production stages and how they relate to each other. If you aren’t familiar with those stages, read that instead.

What is Pre-Production, anyway?

Well, as one of my colleagues, Mark, put it: the whole idea of a Pre-Production/Production split is merely an artifact of the developer/publisher split in responsibility, funding, project ownership, etc. It’s there because the developers can’t answer most of the questions until they’ve actually written most of the game, but the publishers are desperate to “reduce risks” by “eliminating unknowns”.

I did a quick google to see what other people have said about pre-prod for games, and one of the first hits included the quote “PreProduction has become the most important phase of the development cycle”. Actually, I think (like Mark) that Pre-Production has always been the most important phase, as far as the developers are concerned, although usually it’s never allowed to last long enough to be that important in the overall project. Despite being usually much shorter than Production, with much smaller resource (many fewer staff, etc), arguably it’s where the true art and craft of making fun games happens. Everything that follows is an attempt to fit the square peg of game development into a round hole, to curtail changes, to control spending arbitrarily, and to fulfil the vision that’s created during pre-production without allowing for the possibility of the team changing their mind on what’s going to make the game fun, or a success.

…which coincidentally brings us full circle, as this is one of the biggest reasons that game developers are trying to adopt Scrum in the first place. Scrum promises a large amount of “changing your mind” whilst keeping budgets and spending very efficient - even, magically, promising even tighter levels of control of the spend whilst granting much much more freedom of creativity. Yeah, you can have your cake and eat it! (unless the cake is a lie)

What about the movie industry?

Well, yeah, because the term “pre-production” comes from there first. I guess - just a wild guess here - that it got imported to the games industry by EA, probably around the time they imported the job title “Producer” to mean, a la movie-parlance, someone who combines organizational and creative responsibilities (a merged lead designer/project manager).

“In digital video, photography, television and film, pre-production refers to the tasks that must be completed or executed before filming or shooting begins. This includes tasks such as hiring actors or models, building sets, budgeting, planning, scheduling, renting equipment and tests, to name a few of the many pre-production tasks.”

Here’s the problem: whereas a movie starts with a FULLY WRITTEN script, the game design for a game is never complete until the day you ship. That means that where a movie has the luxury of looking at the script on day 1, and starting to do things like “building sets”, the game equivalent can only be guessed at for the majority of the project lifetime. Pre-production, in a movie industry sense, is impossible and nonsensical for the majority of computer games development. (leaving aside the exceptions of the few games, such as the infamously sequel-tastic EA Sports titles, where the game design doesn’t change and has very little innovative or new added during the course of the project. For anyone not in the industry, FYI: those are rare in the overall constellation of games developed each year).

Scrum and the effect on game production

With a Scrum project, you are ready to *ship* the product every single month (or fortnight, or even week, depending upon your sprint length). If you start by using Scrum at the concept stage, as we have for some of our projects, then … how do you decide when to transition to pre-production? And, more importantly, when to transition to Production?

Because Scrum, as far as I can see, is granting the development team an infinitely-long Concept stage (or, at the very least, an infinite Pre-Produtction stage): at every moment they are free to take any part of the product and throw it away and replace it with something better. One of the great mantras of Production is “thou shalt not throw anything away … unless there’s no way the game can ship with it in current state (and that usually doesn’t apply until you’re really close to shipping”. I’m not saying that’s a mantra anyone chose, I’m observing that de facto it seems to be how publishers and producers end up handling the Production phase. Maybe I’ve just seen a lot of bad examples - but I think not. I think this is an inevitable side-effect of the “avoid risk and avoid extra expense” strategy that the publishers have chosen as the purpose of Production.

So … if you’re permanently in pre-prod, how do you decide when to go to the publisher’s GreenLight committee (or whatever your publisher calls their equivalent)?

It occurred to me that the answer, with any publisher that understands Scrum, is: You don’t. They come to you.

The Power of … Scrum

Every time you finish a sprint, the publisher should have at least one representative turning up to the review meeting to see what’s happening and what’s been changed/completed/added/removed.

They should also be making a judgement every single sprint of: as a publisher, do WE want to “move this ahead” into pre-production, or from pre-production into production.

This is one of the explicit aims of Scrum, to give the person who’s commissioned the project (i.e. the publisher, who’s paying for all this development!) the ability to make extremely well-informed decisions about the project at any point. They are informed and empowered. So, they need to take that power and that information and decide for themselves what to do.

Fundamentally, the decision was never in the hands of the developer, and with Scrum, I think that maybe it doesn’t need to be something the developer is even all that aware of any more. Old-style, you have to explicitly make a special final build for the end of Pre-Production - but with Scrum, you’re doing that all the time anyway.

I could be completely wrong, of course…

I see this as one of the interesting unanswered questions with Scrum for games dev, of which there are many, all in the area of “Ok, sure, we can all see how it fits in with day-to-day development - but how the heck does it affect the traditional developer/publisher relationship, and how does it alter the traditional processes that exist in that area?”. Scrum, in its mainstream incarnation, doesn’t deal with a developer/publisher relationship - no surprise, really, because almost no other software development industry has such an odd dynamic as its centra driving force.

But what the heck. Here’s my stab in the dark at this small part of it. I’d love to know what you think.

Filed under : agile, computer games, dev-process, games design, games industry

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What is Pre-Production in games development? What is Production? What’s the difference?

I’ve just written a (draft) post that requires you to know those things well before it makes sense, and I started off by including a grossly over-simplified idiot’s-guide to these things. Then I looked back and saw it had become as long as the main post itself, and I didn’t want to cut it because it explains a lot of my (possibly wrong) assumptions. So, here it is. The other post - the one I really wanted to write, will be along shortly :).

Traditional process

Splits into 3 sections. I’m talking about all games here, not MMOs in particular (MMO’s add some extra stages, like “post-launch” and “beta” which have a LOT more special meaning that many mainstream game developers realise, but those are mostly handled by extra dev-teams, so that the main development process is still almost the same as with normal games)

Concept: Summary

Someone has an idea for a game, often a lead game designer, but also often NOT a designer (incidentally, it’s often an Exec Producer, since they will be the one who has to recruit the entire team, drive the project, and ensure it’s a profitable success). They get together some basic sketch of the game design, maybe only a few pages, plus some artwork to show what it might look like - look-and-feel stuff - and any other materials that help to explain the idea.

Concept: Output

They write a Powerpoint presentation, basically nothing more than that.

Concept: Gate to next stage

You “pitch” this to the publisher; if they give concept approval, and some money (or just free resource for an internal studio), the project goes ahead.

Pre-Production: Summary

A small team of people is assembled. For a simple flash-only casual game this could in fact be literally one person, or two people. For a AAA first person shooter, it’s likely to be around 5-10 people, an equal mix of artists, designers, and programmers.

Time-out for a moment here: a big point of variation exists here. On many projects / with many publishers, the artists produce most of the concept art in the Concept stage. On others, they produce most of it in the Pre-Production stag. Concept art doesn’t require ANY tools, engine, or game design - mostly it just comes out of the artist’s own fertile imagination. It’s usually “inspired by” the basic concept that the vision holder explained to them. Often, the vision holder and/or design team uses the concept art to help them refine their own ideas of what the game is going to be. It’s a highly mutually-supportive process. Doesn’t have to be, of course - depends how clear and how precise the original vision is.

Another time-out: some companies regularly have the programmers produce a working demo at the end of pre-production. IMHO, this is the first running leap along the slippery slope to destroying the developer: any working demo that’s held up as “illustrative” of the final game constitutes the majority chunk of development risk and spending for the entire game project. A publisher who asks for a demo at the end of pre-prod is being very wise - they’re asking for the majority of all the development risk to be removed before they fund the main game. But they’re also being incredibly greedy, and incredibly stupid - the demo either will have very little to do with the final game, or else it will push the developer towards going out of business, because there’s no way they can pay enough staff to get a demo done on the tiny budget that a publisher will unlock for pre-production. Publishers typically justify this with “it’s only pre-production; you don’t need much money”.

OTOH, many publishers have been operating massive pre-productions, which means that they can get that risk-stuff taken care of without being greedy/stupid. Pre-production periods lasting *multiple years* are happening a lot in the MMO industry these days. I did a double-take when I first saw that, but no-one else seems to be batting an eyelid at it. So, I’m not bashing all publishers here, just pointing out that it’s quite widespread to be naive about what’s reasonable, and that there’s a lot of bad contracts out there.

Pre-Production: Output

Enough of a game-design, enough of an art-direction, enough of a technical specification, enough of a project schedule / GANTT chart … that the leads (design, art, and code) and the Producer feel confident to state “yes, we can make this, for that much money, and it’s going to be a GOOD game”.

Pre-Production: Gate to next stage

Publisher listens to the arguments from the leads + publisher, either written or oral (usually a mixture of the two), then examines the evidence (should be plenty by this point, either as artwork, or as a series of small demos of different technologies, or demos of small aspects of gameplay, or as formal game-design documents detailing how the game will work), and a bunch of highly experienced and highly-paid senior people make a judgement call on whether this game is really going to work, whether it will be worth it, how much money it will make, how it fits into their ongoing sales plans as a publisher, and whether this development team can actually deliver on their promises. If they like it, they release the majority of the development budget and the game is “green lit” to go ahead in “full production”.

Production: Summary

Well, now the leads and the Producer go ahead and make the game they said they were going to.

Do you see a problem?

Has anyone yet written a predictive measure of “fun”, or worked out how you can “plan” for a game to be fun before you’ve actually written it and *played* it? Not really (though there are many good attempts out there…).

So, who is Pre Production for, and who is Production for anyway? I reckon the former is for the Developers, and the latter is for the Publishers. Certainly, it’s always the Publisher who makes the final call on whether a game moves into Production or not - although obviously the developer has to make a judgement call on when they think they are ready to submit themselves to that judgement. In practice, external dev teams often run out of pre-production budget and so the decision is forced upon them to a certain extent, whereas internal teams can - if they’re politically skilled enough - carry on coasting for quite a while longer.

Filed under : computer games, dev-process, games design, games industry

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Someone at work forwarded around this article/manifesto about how “Great story is the Holy Grail of gaming”. I read it, and replied that I found every single paragraph had at least one stupid claim or ridiculous statement in it, and that overall the manifesto was basically a load of ****.

It was a Monday morning, maybe I overreacted. Maybe not. Anyway, someone asked me to explain more specifically what I was objecting to, so I write a quick analysis of the first three paragraphs. I was going to go through the whole first page, but realised that even after just one sub-section, it was clear the rest of the thing isn’t even worth reading (I did read the rest of it first time around, of coure). I thought it might be good to post here, mainly because I object to people spouting crap about game design. There’s also a blog post where you can comment about the article. This is all in my own humble opinion, of course, I expect you have your own opinion…
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Filed under : bitching, computer games, games design

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At the Casual Games conference at GDC 06, one of the audience stood up and asked the panel of Serious Games or Casual Games industry experts whether they thought that Brain Training was going to do similar numbers in the US as it had done in Japan, and how that might change the face of casual gaming.

The response from the panel was almost literally: “What? Never heard of it”, leading to shock and awe on the part of the questioner, and a collective shrug of “who cares?” from the panel. I was very surprised, but also highly amused at the ignorance of the US casual games people on the panel, and expected that sooner or later they’d get their comeuppance for not paying any attention to worldwide big trends like BT.
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Filed under : computer games, conferences, games industry

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I just heard this talk at the MMOGfest academic mini-conference last week - apparently, it’s mostly the same as the talk he gave at the independent MMO conference earlier this year, but I think a lot of people didn’t manage to go to that one, so it seems worth reporting here.

Like all the other conference-talk writeups, any errors and ommissions are my fault, and my personal comments appear in square brackets throughout.

Summary

As noted in his Guardian article, “We’ve won”: games are here to stay. In the MMO space - despite all the threats and challenges - it looks like MMOs will continue to innovate and expand, and become better and better. A good, upbeat, keynote talk.
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Filed under : computer games, conferences, games design, games industry, massively multiplayer

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I’m seriously fed up with the mediocrity (you could use worse words; I’m being civil here) of most MMO publishers’ patching systems for MMOs. The very least you should expect as a player, even back in 2001, should have been something akin to the PS3 / 360 patching systems today: the most basic “fire and forget” - you try to play the game, it does a background download, then popsup to tell you when to click to finish the install. That’s *it*. No more.

So, how should it be? Well…
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Filed under : bitching, computer games, games design, massively multiplayer, web 2.0

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Edward Hunter, comScore

Summary

Some useful stats, and some interesting issues raised in terms of privacy and practicalities of gathering stats.

A lot of good advice on how to select a target market for an online game that’s better than “any hardcore RPG players” - both better as in more precise and usable, and also better as in bigger and worth more money.

LOTS of questions afterwards; read to the bottom to see them all.
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Filed under : ION 2008, computer games, conferences, databases, games industry, massively multiplayer, web 2.0

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Nicole Lazzaro

Summary

I think Nicole is wonderfully off the wall, and this lecture underlined that. At the very dull GDC “roundtable” (where less than 10% of the audience opened their mouths) this year on Free to play, Pay for Items, she came out with the idea that we should be looking at making buying things in online games as enjoyable as shopping is in real life, and wondered why this inherently addictive real-world activity was so dull in almost all online games.

Unfortunately, I found the lecture a bit too off-the-wall, and very hard to follow, even having briefly looked at her proprietary “language of fun” docs before.
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Filed under : ION 2008, computer games, conferences, games design, web 2.0

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