T=Machine

What’s a browser MMO? Today, not 5 years ago?

In the previous post I poked Earth Eternal for claiming to be the “*REAL* MMO for your browser”, and disappointing on that front (although it could be awesome on all other fronts). I finished with:

So … EE may be a great game … and it may be launchable from within a browser … but it’s a long way from a poster-child for browser-based MMOs. It’s still fighting the browser as much as it’s complementing it.

It’s 2010. I know a lot of people in the industry still haven’t accepted even the concept of a “browser-based” MMO, let alone realise where they’ve got to now.

I’m not in the loop on this stuff any more, but it set me to wondering what I’d be chasing if I weren’t doing iPhone exclusively right now.

What about you? Are you fighting the browser?

The Executive’s impression

Game developers aren’t stupid. Executives aren’t clueless. But some are.

In the minds of those who make games but “don’t do” browser games on principle, I’ve found “a browser MMO” often means some or all of:

1. A text-only game running off a single Perl webpage, where each action causes the whole page to be refreshed.
2. Non-real-time interaction (because, you know … web-servers aren’t powerful enough to run anything in real-time)
3. High-latency, jerky, shallow movement of characters and objects
4. Weak 3D graphics – 5 years or more behind the curve of Console graphics
5. Fat client downloads that “no-one” can be bothered to wait for, and would be better-off distributed on a DVD

What’s reality? Well, here’s a few observations…

Drop-dead gorgeous graphics … are the norm

For a look at today, go browse some of the Unity demos. Unity is *not* the “best” 3D engine, the fastest, the best language – but it’s nicely balanced towards ease of adoption. It’s very easy for new developers to get into. And so it’s setting a very achievable base standard that’s higher than many people would believe. With anyone able to produce 3D to this level, and embed it in the browser almost as an afterthought, the use of plugins becomes a new landscape.

Right now, crappy Flash MMO’s are still re-treading the ground of Dragon Fable (which is coming up to it’s 4th birthday) et al – albeit that’s now the “standard” and there is better and better appearing. But just as it only took a few games to adopt this approach and show how good it could look, widespread adoption of Unity, and a few high-profile innovative products, will drag forwards the rest of us.

(by “us” I don’t mean professional developers, I mean primarily the amateur and semi-pro teams who don’t yet work for a living – the students etc)

2 years ago I wouldn’t have thought it would be necessary to say this (I assumed that FB would have kicked everyone’s butts) but maybe it’s still relevant: going forwards, I suspect “browser MMOs” still need to be a lot more “browser” and a lot less “traditional MMO” if they wish to stand out.

The facebook question

Browser MMO, huh? So … Why is there no option to use Facebook Connect to login? In 2010, I think that’s what browser-MMO probably means to most people: “it works from Facebook”.

The massive, fundamental changes to Facebook that are coming in this year may push a lot of content-providers off FB, and back to the web – but users will continue to demand single-sign-on access, and shared access to friends lists. This already works, off-site, thanks to Facebook Connect (both for websites and for other hardware platforms, e.g. iPhone).

I may be completely wrong, but my suspicion is that many developers still want to “use Facebook”, by which they mean:

“use (the large number of accounts on) Facebook (to get lots of users in our game without having to do so much advertising)”.

…while (again, merely a suspicion) users want their games to “use Facebook”, by which they mean:

“use (the apps, data, and list of friends I already have on) Facebook (to reduce the effort I go through to play the game)”

The problem here is the developer is chasing more signups, and the user is chasing ease-of-access. IMHO, the FB changes are going to cut off most of the former, leaving the question: who will do best at fulfilling the latter?

The Glottal-Stops and Square Pegs of User Experience

When people surf to your MMO direct from the Web, do they get a feeling akin to the glottal-stop? Do they feel like they mentally “stumbled”, as the paradigms and user-interface go through a sudden change?

Embedded within an ordinary web-browser, does your MMO look like a square peg forced into a round hole?

The effects are subtle, but they decrease virality, decrease engagement. The effects are tiny, but with millions of web-users out there, they can be cumulative. Each time a user experiences this, you marginally shrink your maximum user-base, and you push your conversion rate down.

Why was I so shocked that Earth Eternal is (silently) Windows-only? (as is/was Free Realms, for that matter)

Well, largely because it reminded me of years ago, when you’d occasionally go to a website only to see:

“This site is only valid in Internet Explorer; you are not running that browser, so you are seeing this special page instead of the site. Please download IE now and then come back.” (or Netscape, or “desktop, but you are using a mobile phone”, etc)

History suggests that this is not a viable strategy when you’re fighting it out on the web…

I’ll know it when I see it

I’m waiting for one feature in a major MMO. I’ve seen it in a few “amateur” MMOs, and you get it on Facebook apps etc. It’s a fundamental expectation from the Web, and it is incredibly powerful:

Each piece of interesting content is *named* … it has a unique URL … so that I can directly tweet places, events, people, and things. I can bookmark conversations I’ve had. I can archive, I can cite, save, and return.

Bonus points for incorporating a bit.ly service in the client, so I can literally copy/paste direct into twitter

I’m hoping it’s out there already, and I just haven’t spotted it yet. When it comes, someone let me know; until then, I’ll be spending more time in flash games, and less in mainstream MMO’s. I prefer my gaming to be Web-compatible, thanks…

Filed under : computer games, design, games design, web 2.0

6 Comments »

(if you haven’t read the main post explaining this, read this first)

Submission

• Author: Chris Locher (calocher at gmail.com)
• Title: “Net Quest: The Search for the win”
• Word count: 500 words

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Filed under : games design

2 Comments »

In general, it seems that most entrants to game-design-competitions could get huge benefit from just a small amount of fairly simple advice and feedback.

I’ve been a judge on several game-design competitions. I’ve seen a lot of recurring mistakes and successes, and I’d like to see less of the former, more of the latter.

I’m hereby offering to provide *public* feedback to anyone who wants to send me their idea. I’ll publish your idea on my blog, along with my thoughts and reactions.

Here are my rules:

1. MINIMUM of 300 words
2. MAXIMUM of 500 words
3. State whether it’s intended to be a Casual game, or a AAA game
4. State whether it’s anonymous, or if you want me to include an email address and/or website URL (for people to contact you if they liked your idea)
5. I will pick the most interesting ones, and publish the main text of your email, and my reactions, on this blog
6. Email it to me directly, at adam.m.s.martin at gmail.com
7. You must include the text: “I have read everything on the blog post, and understand and accept all the terms and conditions”
8. If I can think of someone better-placed to comment on your idea, I *might* forward your idea to another industry-expert blogger, on the condition that they publish it on their blog with their own feedback, just as I would have done myself (unless you SPECIFICALLY state that you don’t want me to do this)

Some notes…

SXSW entrants

If you’re already entered for SXSW 2010, don’t bother sending me your idea until after the conference. I’m not going to allow this to interfere with that event.

Public vs. NDA

If you ask for an NDA, you’ve already lost. Forget it.

In general, the only people who would bother to “steal” your game idea are so incompetent / uncreative that the “best” game they could create – even using your idea! – would be so appallingly bad that no-one would ever play it or talk about it.

Spelling and grammar

I will judge you on your spelling and grammar. Get used to it. If you are so lazy you can’t be bothered to spellcheck your entry, you’ve just screamed:

“I AM TOO LAZY TO DESIGN OR MAKE A GAME, I WILL GIVE UP AS SOON AS IT GETS MILDLY CHALLENGING!!!”

Cheat, cheat, and cheat again

Anything you can do to make your pitch more convincing is acceptable. Within the 500 words limit, of course.

If you’ve got concept art, a downloadable MOD, or even better a faked gameplay video … include links!

Filed under : computer games, conferences, games design, games industry

2 Comments »

In a few months time, I’ll be in Austin, TX, sitting on a panel at SXSW … judging people’s ideas for new computer games. I’m going to make an offer here, now, to help people entering future competitions (FYI: it’s too late for SXSW 2010).

This is the fourth time I’ve been a reviewer or judge for a game-design competition/panel/etc, and I’m noticing some recurring themes. This is interesting, since everything I’ve judged has been completely different (different countries, different audiences, different rules).

Recurring themes of game-design competitions

One theme in particular is that a large percentage (circa 30%) of entries are depressingly bad; it seems that many of the wannabe-game-designers in the world are just plain lazy.

Another theme is that when someone has a good idea, they often don’t realise how good it is. They end up spending one sentence (or, if you’re lucky, two sentences) talking about the interesting part, and the next 500 words spewing out meaningless drivel that applies to every game ever made.

e.g. “you will have different choices to make in this game, there will be puzzles, and when you finish a puzzle you will get a reward, rewards will be used to unlock more levels, and to finish the game you have to get to the last level, which will be harder than the earlier levels, and … ”

… and: STFU. You’re boring. Do you think that I’ve never played a computer game before? Or do you just think I’m so stupid that I can’t remember what they’re like?

Some tragic outcomes

NB: this is just one example of what goes wrong with competition entries; I could give you countless more…

Some of the judging I’ve done was at the start of a competition, where the teams then spent the next 3+ months full-time actually building their games. On those occasions where a team was let through because we saw something special in their core idea, despite them waffling about a million other things, the team tended to make the EXACT SAME MISTAKE during production. They would spend 10% of their time on the cool idea, and 1% on each of 90 irrelevant distractions. They never won (surprise!).

For the times when we just judge ideas, not actual games, my distinct impression is that a lot of “good” ideas get thrown out because they’re submerged in so much rubbish that the judges either don’t see them … or assume the above is going to happen, and so they want to give the attention to other, more focussed teams.

So…

So, I’m offering anyone (anyone!) the chance to get some free feedback on their game idea, in the mindset of a competition judge. Maybe you’ll discover holes in your pitch, maybe you’ll discover ways to improve your core game … maybe it won’t help you at all :).

Details here: Got an idea for a new Game?

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

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I got this in my inbox a few days ago, and it’s been forwarded to me by a few people since:

(NB: the fact that you still have to login MERELY TO READ THE DAMN FAQ linked from the PR statement is IMHO symptomatic of some of MP’s problems :( )

metaplace.com is closing on january 1, 2010

We will be closing down our service on January 1, 2010 at 11:59pm Pacific. The official announcement is here, and you can read a FAQ guide here. We will be having a goodbye celebration party on January 1st at 12:00noon Pacific Time.

Some of the correspondence I’ve seen on this – what went wrong? what should they have done differently? – has been interesting. Personally, I’m in two minds about it. I think there were some great things about and within MP, but from the very start I felt it had no direction and too little real purpose (and if you ask around, I’m sure you’ll find plenty of people who’ll confirm I said that at the time).

I’ll hilight a couple of things that haven’t come up so much in conversations:

Bad

1. On the face of it, MP was “the bad bits of Second Life…” (poor content tools, poor client, no direction, no purpose)
2. “… without the good bits of Second Life” (no sex, no mainstream publicity, wrong target audience to charge millions of dollars in land-rental to)
3. Poor discoverability (how do you find something cool in Metaplace? Go to site, login, download client, wait a lot, browse a weak index, wait for more downloads, wait for content to stream in … etc)

Discoverability was IMHO the killer: this is something that so many “hopeful” social sites and systems get wrong, and only a few get right. The best examples are still simple: browsing your friends’ friends on Facebook by looking at photos of their faces (hmm; who do I fancy?), or using Google to find things you’re looking for (the gold standard in tech, but also the base *expectation* of the modern web surfer).

The history of SLURLs in Second Life should probably be required reading for people interested in this – if you can find ways to experience / re-live life pre-SLURLs, and read through some of the trials and tribulations that Linden went through in getting them to work.

And even then, of course, SL still had no browsability – but it least it had “open” bookmarks and copy/paste references you could share with people, and embed in webpages. That was barely acceptable (and still “awful”) back when SL was in its prime; the equivalent “minimum acceptable” is probably Faceboook Connect with full Facebook integration (i.e. not just FC-login, but having a bona fide FB app too that acts as an alternate access-path for your virtual world).

Good

1. Well, obviously, there was a lot of great content in there. I only skimmed it, but apart from the problems above, I saw a lot of interesting stuff
2. The AJAX/CSS/HTML GUI … it was really easy for me to mess about gaining and browsing badges (both mine and other peoples).

Early on, I found the AJAX vs Flash part particularly interesting. The former showed up how weak the latter (the world-client) was: sometimes I went to the site, all happy about the badges, the popovers, etc, and as soon as I got into the Flash client, my mood would drop noticeably. Eventually, I stopped bothering visiting at all; I dreaded the slow, unwieldy, “clicking all over the place to move fractionally”, Flash experience.

One question I had was how much this was to do with the languages / platforms involved: did AJAX/CSS inspire the people working in it to make lighter-weight, faster, more abstracted core experience? Or is this just coincidence? There should be literally no reason why either of those platforms forced the designers to provide the experiences that way (Flash is capable of a much faster, snappier, fluid usability experience – it’s been excelling at this for years).

Filed under : community, design, facebook, games design, games industry, marketing, massively multiplayer, web 2.0

5 Comments »

(Start by reading Entity Systems are the Future of MMOs Part 1)

It’s been a long time since my last post on this topic. Last year, I stopped working for a big MMO publisher, and since then I’ve been having fun doing MMO Consultancy (helping other teams write their games), and iPhone development (learning how to design and write great iPhone apps).

Previously, I posed some questions and said I’d answer them later:

• how do you define the archetypes for your entities?
• how do you instantiate multiple new entities from a single archetype?
• how do you STORE in-memory entities so that they can be re-instantiated later on?

Let’s answer those first.
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Filed under : design, games design, massively multiplayer, programming

44 Comments »

Let’s get this straight: if we judge him solely by output (games), then he is not a genius – he’s lazy. Everyone knows the 1% inspiration/99% perspiration quote, and – looking at the last shipped title – IMHO it’s inexcusable to ship crap and pretend it’s OK. You can’t just abrogate responsibility once you stick your name on Spore…

(disclaimer: when I say “lazy” I don’t mean universally; I mean that in at least one crucial aspect, he failed to apply simple due diligence to his own named project; arguably, it’s a kind of laziness in itself not to have checked this stuff, or a kind of cowardice not to have insisted it be done “correctly”; but this post is really about the overall impact of the game, and the way that an individual, if they were to stamp their persona on a project – and expect us to read their persona from interacting with the product – comes across. I have no idea what Will Wright is like as an individual; this is a post about Will Wright as the PR entity…)
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Filed under : bitching, computer games, games design

6 Comments »

Tim Schafer recently posted scans of his rejection letters over the years from various tech and games companies he applied to. There’s one from Atari, one from Hewlett Packard – and, eventually, his acceptance letter from Lucasfilm / Lucasarts.

But far, far more important to this post is the cover-letter that Tim sent to Lucasfilm (it’s a truly special cover letter (go have a look now, before you read on)).

There’s also a rich array of comments at the end of Tim’s post. The HR manager (now head of HR at Pixar) who handled his job application all those years ago even chimes in to say hi. But, again, that’s not what I found interesting; what I liked was the large number of comments from wannabe game developers trying to get into the industry right now.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Reading those comments, here’s a couple of things I noticed:

• They feel “inspired” and full of “renewed hope” / “confidence” that they have a chance of getting into the industry at all
• Lots of wishful comments fishing for a confirmation that this technique would “still work today”, while declaring that they’re sure it doesn’t (supposedly demonstrating their realism)
• The realization that lack of experience is no barrier to becoming an industry legend; coincidentally, most of the people saying this have no experience of their own

…and here’s the conclusions that leapt to my mind:

• New entrants to the industry are convinced it’s very hard to “break in”; they sound by turns cynical and hopeless. This is merely to get a *job*, not to actually achieve anything. Ouch
• No-one seems to have told them how easy it can be (how straight-forward it often is)
• They’re guessing at the reasons this was successful, and are picking the wrong ones (hint: what worked for Tim still works today, if anything *even more* than it did 20 years ago)
• Their understanding of what it takes to become a major industry figure is back-to-front

Why was Tim successful? How can you re-create that today?

OK, so Tim was: funny, dedicated, and inventive.

But we’ve all heard (I hope) of many occasions when any or all three of those have not only failed to win people jobs but have got them ridiculed (sometimes even had their desperate exploits broadcast at the company or industry level). I’m not thinking simply of the games industry here – although I noticed one the other week where a hopeful Quest Designer tried it on with Blizzard (they spent a thousand dollars on fancy-printed design docs for their proposed Raid Dungeon, drove to Blizzard’s offices, and spent a couple of days sitting on the sidewalk handing copies to staff as they arrived / left the office each day).

Rather, I was thinking of all the stories of people doing everything from sending in their Resume/CV wrapped in shiny metallic paper, to sending gifts (including alcohol) to the hiring managers, to stuff that comes dangerously close to stalking.

Reading the comments on Tim’s post, in at least a couple of cases, I’m not convinced that the posters see the difference between those disasters and what Tim did. I don’t know any of the people involved, but I do know there are positions we’ve recruited for in the past 5 years where a cover letter akin to Tim’s would have gone a very long way (possibly even “all the way”) towards single-handedly getting us to hire someone.

IMHO, it’s all about skill and enthusiasm (although few companies hire on enthusiasm, so we’ll just stick to the “skill” part)

What Tim shows is skill for the *underlying* things that his (potential) employers would love to see him employ in his day job. That requires showing ALL of the following:

• Personal interest (he plays games. He plays them enough for the next part to be possible)
• Understanding of a genre (he understands a genre well enough to pastiche it effectively; you can’t do that if all you’ve done is dabble in it (unless you’re particularly skilled at literary/experience analysis – which is great, we want that too! ))
• Ability to polish (look at the images; notice how he sends up each of LA and Silicon Valley in panels 2a and 2b, and makes out San Rafael to be the land of Nature and Sunshine and happiness)
• Knowing when to stop (again, look at the images. The “volume” of detail is actually very small; apart from the final image, they are very simple, and quick to execute)

One thing we don’t know, that I’d love to know, is the timing: how long after the phone call did he send this in? I’ve known candidates to take *more than a month* to complete something that was offered (by them!) in a job interview. WTF? If you say you have something, we assume you either have it, or will complete it imminently. i.e. days – a week at the most.

TO GET A JOB IN THE GAMES INDUSTRY, ALL YOU NEED TO DO IS …

Let’s see how simple I can make this…

Make a game.

3 words. Not bad. I think that’s pretty clear.

Sadly, most people misunderstand it *completely*.

Look back at the rest of this blog post; it all lead up to this. When college students ask senior people, and hiring managers, what to do to get their first job, and we say “make a game; make several games”, our reasons for saying that are all encapsulated in what I’ve already said.

Even if you’re in a discipline that has read-made degrees (Programming: Computer Science; Art: Fine Art, etc), what you’re usually showing with your degree is a small amount of education and a large amount of skill / aptitude. University/College rarely teaches the things you’ll need every day to do your job, but it prepares you in a more general way to be/become skilled more quickly.

Imagining a game is easy; if you like games, you should be able to imagine games you’d like to play, or make.

Making a game is easy, if you only ever make a game that fits within your abilities and resources. I’ve made games in under a day. Some of them were even fun! ;). I have a friend who *frequently* writes entire games in a single evening. He’s a programmer, with no art or game-design skills – but some of what he makes looks gorgeous and is great fun; he cheats; so should you. So … never tell me that making a game is “beyond” you; just shrink your ambition to fit.

(incidentally, “I can’t program” is not a valid excuse; pre-teen children regularly learn to program – (IIRC it’s still in the national curriculum in most western countries, although it’s not labelled “computer programming”) – and if they can handle it, what’s wrong with you that you’re too stupid/lazy to do it too? No-one’s asking you to learn highly optimized C++, that would be insane. But … all you need is Basic, PHP, Javascript, or something similar)

Finishing making a game – removing all the “doesn’t actually work” parts – is hard. But everyone who’s been there should understand: it’s *hard* to include all the bits that weren’t fun for you to make. It’s hard to force yourself to check all the buttons still work every time you change something. It’s hard to force yourself to write in-game instructions *and keep them up-to-date* each time you change the game-design, or add/remove a feature.

And that’s a big part of why we judge you on it. Because if you can do that – more than anything else – all the other problems are smaller, more tractable.

Filed under : games design, games industry, recruiting

12 Comments »

Last night, I had another game approved for the App Store…

iTunes: click here to open iTunes download page

I started writing this as a real-life demo on how to use the tech for my new company (if any of our early access licensees are reading this, a project ZIP with full source code should appear on your dashboard imminently), but I gave it to a few friends to test, and they liked it so much I thought I’d put it up on the App Store too.

I’ll be updating it over time to add more of the features from our tech. If enough people download it, I might even make a paid version (which would be pretty handy as an example, too :)) with some more features, more powerups, etc.

Filed under : dev-process, games design, iphone

1 Comment »

A lot of people asked me to blog as this volunteer project progressed, share some insight into how things were going. I’ve not had enough time until just now, and it’s a mix: Some good news, some bad news.
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Filed under : devdiary, entrepreneurship, games design, iphone, startup advice

4 Comments »

(c.f. my original post here: http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/06/28/want-to-help-write-a-simple-rpg-for-iphone/)

I’ve been playing around with GUI setups for DM / EOTB / Wizardry clones on iPhone, and thought I’d post some of the more interesting results here – I’m interested to see what other people think of each of them.

The first three are all assuming a single-character RPG, the fourth is something more like DM / Wizardry (could be 6 chars, could be 3).

Everything is clickable – small maps become full screen map, blue buttons fire spells, character portraits go to the inventory screens.

Screens with no arrow buttons require you to drag your finger forwards/backwards/left/right to move, and allow 360 degree movement. Screens with arrow buttons assume you can only turn 90 degrees at a time (like the original games), although they smoothly animate the rotations (UN-like the original games – because I have access to OpenGL to do the 3D for me).

What do you think?

Filed under : computer games, design, dev-process, devdiary, games design, iphone

4 Comments »

Now I’ve recovered from GDC illness, I’ve got a little free time again, and I’m starting one of the iPhone games I wanted to write. This is a “for fun and learning” project, so it’s deliberately chosen to be low maintenance / easy to make a first version / easy to extend later / etc. I need artists, designers, quest-writers, and programmers.

Well, I don’t *need* anyone; I can do this all myself. But I’d rather do it with other people, and I thought there might be some hobbyists reading this who’d like to do something similar.

EDIT: there’s now a googlegroup for people working on this. You *must* contact me first via email (see below) or your request to join will be automatically rejected. http://groups.google.com/group/dmclone
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Filed under : MMOG development, computer games, design, games design, iphone, programming

6 Comments »

Richard has often been accused of being “arrogant”, “insane”, and even, simply, “wrong” for his comments along the lines of:

1. He hasn’t “played” an MMO in decades (possibly “ever”) … because he can’t stop himself from interpreting as he uses them
2. Surprisingly many MMOs are just WoW by another name
3. He only needs to play the first few levels of a new MMO to see if it’s really new; he needn’t bother with the rest of it

He’s explained before, in abstract terms, why this is all true *to him*, and pretty much left people to stew if they don’t understand that (while always actively engaging them in conversation to try and explain further).

Now he’s blogged a concrete example of what goes through his head when playing a particular quest-chain / zone: WoW’s STV. If you’ve ever wondered, and/or been confused/horrified/dismayed/insulted by Richard’s statements online and haven’t had the chance to speak to him about it all in person, then I’d highly recommend reading it. I suspect that this concrete analysis will elucidate to a lot more people most of the meaning that the abstract explanations failed to convey. Well, we’ll see…

Filed under : computer games, design, games design

1 Comment »

Reviewing video games is hard. In some ways, it’s an impossible mission: a reviewer has too many conflicting interests:

1. please the publishers or else be denied access to the materials they seek to review
2. please their editor or else don’t get paid; but the editor’s primary source of capital is often advertising … from the publishers
3. answer the consumer’s main question in a way that earns their trust: should they purchase this game or not?
4. stand out from the crowd of a million game players who decide to write about their hobby

Who’s your Daddy?

This has been a problem for as long as I can remember (20+ years of game playing and reading game reviews); the consumer *believes* that the reviewer is answerable to them – but it has been a very long time (10 years now?) since consumers were the paymaster of reviewers; nowadays, it’s advertisers (which usually means: game-publishers).

Of course, consumers still wield huge power. The virtuous value circle – the only circle that matters – is driven by consumers:

• A reviewer has a “readership” of consumers who are influenced in their purchasing decisions by those reviews
• Publishers therefore court the reviewer to try and curry favour with the consumers and increase sales of the publishers’ products (to those readers, and anyone they themselves influence – friends, family, colleagues, etc)
• Reviewers earn more money, and get deeper access to development teams (courtesy of the publishers), so produce more reviews

But that power is – clearly – both indirect and hard to quantify. A consumer – even many of them – threatening to “stop reading a reviewer’s reviews” is not particularly effective.

Publications like Edge helped along the indirection of consumer-power when they decided to go out of their way to obscure the identities of their individual reviewers, turning reviews into as much of a crap-shoot as buying games was in the first place. Since the web rose to prominence, it’s been eroded at the other end – there’s now so many reviewers around that, well … who has the time to remember who any individual reviewer is?

Qui custodet custodes?

But if journalists/reviewers are supposedly there as a watchdog on the publishers’ marketing depts, supposedly helping the consumer determine which are the (non-refundable) purchases they ought to be making, then who’s checking that the journalists themselves are honest?

No-one, really. And that’s where the rot begins. The storms of outraged public opinion are nothing new: examples of journalists writing reviews of games (reviews both scathing and rejoicing) they hadn’t even played go way back into the 1980’s.

A case study in lies, damn lies, and video game journalism

In case you hadn’t heard, this week a “staff writer” from Eurogamer (a games review / news site) ripped to pieces one of the most recently-released MMOs – Darkfall. At which point Aventurine, the developer of Darkfall, responded with increasing anger and dismay.

But the really interesting thing here is that Aventurine didn’t merely rant “you bastards! Our game is Teh Awesum!!!111! STFU, Beotch!” (well, they did that as well) … no, they dropped a little A-bomb in the middle of their reply:

“We checked the logs for the 2 accounts we gave Eurogamer and we found that one of them had around 3 minutes playtime, and the other had less than 2 hours spread out in 13 sessions. Most of these 2 hours were spent in the character creator”

Pwned. MMO developers *actually know whether your journalist played the game before reviewing it*. What’s more … they have proof…

The EG reviewer (whose “references and background are immaculate”, according to the editor – but from reading his only two EG reviews, I’m afraid it does rather sound like he knows little about MMOs), responded (via his editor) with the claim:

“the logs miss out two crucial days and understate others, … and he insists he played the game for at least nine hours”

It would seem that someone is lying (and it could be either party). Worse, someone is being particularly stupid. Because the journalist is claiming “your computers lie”, and the developer is claiming “your journalist is a lier”; either way, it’s not a subtle, small, mistake – whoever is wrong, if they get discovered, they’re going to create themself a good amount of long-term trouble (bad reputation).

Lots of MMO developers write shitty server code, and honestly don’t know what the hell is going-on inside their own game-world (but fondly imagine that they do – and proudly boast to the press (in the vaguest terms) that they do). But the rule of thumb is that devs who don’t know … don’t even know what it is they ought to be claiming that they know. The specificity of Aventurine’s claims suggests that they do have the stats, and those stats are mostly correct.

(I say “mostly” because there is a bit of vagueness about what – precisely – the reviewer was doing in-game. That reeks of holes in their metrics/logging. They clearly know when the player was logged-in, and what they did/said in chat, and how many characters were created – but apparently not what they were doing in the client, e.g. how long did they spend in character creation? Implicitly: unlogged; unknown)

Whereas it’s quite likely that a non-knowledgeable journalist, accustomed to buggy games, would assume that they could safely claim “your server is buggy, those figures are wrong”.

Unfortunately for any such journalist, server logs are generally either correct, or absent entirely – there’s rarely any middle-ground. If he knew a bit more about MMO tech he might know this; very few journos (any of them?) know that much about the games they review, though.

So … based on nothing but casual observation and intimate knowledge of the tech issues (and several decades of reading game reviews…), I’m leaning in favour of Adventurine and against Ed Zelton. My guess (pure *guess*) is that he’s been caught out being either incompetent or perhaps a bit lazy as a reviewer, and he’s thought he could get away with blaming it on buggy code. From reading the review, I get the impression he wishes he were Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw (from Zero Punctuation) – although he clearly isn’t funny enough – but he seems to like saying “it’s shit; you’re shit; you’re all shit; STFU” instead of reviewing the game, and seems to think that’s good enough. As an MMO player, my feeling was that the review was, well … useless – without even playing the game, there is so much more I would want to hear in a review, and so much of his wanky whining that I couldn’t care less about. As an MMO developer, it felt downright insulting, as if he’d made no effort at all to play the game as a game. Actually, it felt like he’d hardly played MMOs in his life, and didn’t really know what they were.

(NB, from the review: his apparent ignorance of some of the most important *and best-selling* RPG + MMORPG games of all time – the Ultima series – suggests that he really isn’t much good as a game reviewer. YMMV.)

Reviewing the reviewers

Up-front I’m going to point out that I don’t believe all MMO developers are currently capable of doing this – many people would be amazed to discover the true state of metrics collection in this industry – although *all* modern MMO developers ought to, and it’s not too hard to add-on later (add it to the list of “things MMO developers ought to do as standard practice, but many of them don’t do”). But it’s a general thing that I think we should move towards.

MMO developers (well, actually, the Operators, but that’s getting pedantic) are in an excellent position to help guard journalistic honesty, in a way that traditional game developers have never been able to. I would like to start seeing the following published by *every* MMO developer each time their game is reviewed:

1. What level the account(s) started at
2. What level the account(s) peaked at
3. How many hours the reviewer spent at the lowest levels, levelling-up manually
4. How many hours the reviewer spent at the highest levels
5. What percentage of time was spent on each of the different primary character classes and factions
6. Which areas of the game / aspects the reviewer actually engaged in (hours of combat, hours of crafting, hours of chat, etc)

…but, honestly, this isn’t so much about “journalistic honesty” (I used that phrase tongue-in-cheek above) as it is about starting a virtuous cycle of developers being more cognizant of what, actually, players “do” in their games – preferably *before* gold launch. In particular, if publishers (developers) started supplementing reviews with this info (as a matter of course), I think we’d see a sea-change in industry staff appreciating three key things about metrics:

1. How little metrics they’re actually collecting compared to how much they think they’re collecting
2. What metrics actually matter, and/or are useful?
3. How players actually play the game; by extension: how fun is the game, really, and which parts suck horribly?

Does this work / matter?

At NCsoft, I got into the habit of asking prospective partners, hires/employees, and external studios which MMO’s they played (fair enough) … and how many characters they’d got to the level-cap with / what level their characters had reached. It started as an innocent question, but I quickly noticed how often it gave early warning of failures of honesty among individuals, and how much it presaged the problems they would have in the future.

The two worst problems were “complete ignorance of the MMO industry (either of pre-existing design practices, or tech practices)” and “personal self-deceit about what the person knows, and what they don’t know”. The latter tended to be a far worse problem: when someone is deceiving *themself*, it’s doubly hard to re-educate them, because first you have to get them to accept their own deception.

Of course, it turned out to lead to a lot of defensive responses and a spew of self-justification, which made us both uncomfortable. In those situations, it can easily lead to making assumptions that certain people’s opinions are “worth less” because, say, you know for a fact they’ve never really played an MMO – at least, not in the way that most of that MMO’s players would/will/do play it. I hate that tendency, since it’s part of a snobbishness that lies at the root of a lot of oyster-like, head-in-sand behaviour in our industry. On the other hand, it’s important and useful to know when someone’s ideas are random conjecture and when they’re based on fact (and very few people in a design meeting or publisher/developer meeting will honestly tell you their ideas are conjecture :)).

On the whole, though, it turned out to be a really useful line of questioning – even bearing in mind the additional (smaller) problems it created. There are obvious problems that come from the statistical supplementing of free-form prose game-reviews – but I’m confident that these will be outweighed by the advantages (and the problems that will be shrunk).

PS:

Despite the TLC of good friends, I’m still weak and sapped of all energy from my month of illness. I’m triaging like mad to deal with urgent issues, but there’s plenty of highly important stuff that’s been pending on me for a while that I still haven’t had the time + energy to deal with. So, if you’re still waiting … I’m sorry.

Filed under : computer games, games design, games industry, marketing, massively multiplayer

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This talk was all about a theory of innovation/finding new markets known as Blue Ocean Strategy, from a book published in 2005. I first came across this book/theory when I joined NCsoft a few years ago (apparently, the CEO and board in Korea were very keen on it), which is quite ironic given NCsoft’s international activities of the past few years.

It was a good talk overall, with lots of honest and insightful comments from the panellists. The best bit was probably Q&A at the end – which I had to miss :(. Not everything they said was great, there were some dodgy bits, and I missed most of the second half, but it was clearly worth going to.

Bear in mind, though, that on the morning of this talk I was already considering an opportunity I’d seen that seemed to replace traditional games publishers and was looking like it might work extremely well. So … this talk was accidentally of a lot more relevance to me than I’d realised it would be :).

My own commentary in [ square brackets ], any mistakes/misunderstandings my own fault :).
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Filed under : GDC 2009, games design, games industry, social networking

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Wifi and internet at all is a priviledge – but Free Wifi is something that in our modern society, and the society we’re set to become, needs to be treated as a right. When I started writing this, I was looking at the benefits we have yet to see (ubiquitous free wifi); in the week I’ve been offline with jetlag, the preceding benefits we already have that would make them possible – flat rate internet – are being ripped away from us, and . Both are understandable, but … yikes.

Casual, assumed, free internet access is now ubiquitous (even if the access itself isn’t as operationally ubiquitous as services assume). I can’t even access half my music collection any more unless I’ve got a wireless high-bandwidth connection available (Spotify). The other half lives on my MP3 player (iPhone) – but is static, unmeasured, unconnected, and unshareable.

This is a problem. Right now, sitting in San Francisco, the city of a thousand broken, crashing, low-bandwidth, pay-per-minute (min charge 24 hours) wifi connections, next door to Silicon Valley, a world center of innovation that only exists because the right infrastructure here and the wrong mistakes elsewhere allowed it to form, it’s particularly on my mind. SF is a great example of what will push the next Silicon Valley to happen elsewhere. A lot of people ought to be worried by that – and doing a little more about it.

In Brighton, my current (temporary) home city, the first repeated free wifi hotspots were set up – as I understand it – effectively as an act of charitable benevolence by “a couple of guys” (looseconnection.com/Josh Russell). They weren’t even rich, or old – just some kids doing something cool, and useful. Anyone could do this. Too few actually do. I’ve heard it suggested again and again (where are the mesh networks that were supposed to be ubiquitous 4 years ago?) by people in the UK – especially in and around Cambridge, in tech the UK’s closest replica of Silicon Valley – but always with excuses about why they aren’t doing it yet, aren’t able to until someone else does something else to make it easier for them. That’s crap. Just do it. Do it this weekend; what better are you doing right now?

Will Apple single-handedly save Wifi? Maybe. It could be the biggest gift of iPhone: that it finally turns the rest of the world on to building bigger, better, and above all FREE, wifi networks. Everywhere. Ironic, considering that’s exactly what will kill the fundamental device that drives the iPhone: the “cell” phone. Does anybody else remember that before we had cell phones we had hotspot phones, back when cells weren’t good enough, and were so expensive to use? So we go full circle, but this time with an ecosystem and a tech interconnection system (API’s, protocols, layers) big enough to support the worldwide rollout of such hotspots (well, and that’s what mesh was supposed to be about, right?)

But why would this happen? It doesn’t make sense … does it?

Skype is a great example. Sadly, it’s also overloaded with additional meaning that clouds the issue – because Skype is an internet app (good) that is mostly about phone calls (bad / confusing the issue).

Skype is now available on iPhone, and it’s a great, highly polished, iPhone App. It *works* (as well as anything can on iPhone – with the current version of iPhone Apple does not allow *anyone* to have their app listen for incoming connections and auto-start, so you can only “receive” Skype calls on your iPhone if you are not using any other app and instead are currently inside the Skype App.

But … the voice part only works over Wifi. This is the concession it took for Skype to be “allowed” on iPhone (NB: Apple allegedly forced the network operators to give away free / flat rate data in return for being “allowed” to sell network-locked iPhones; if Apple had also allowed Skype-on-3G/EDGE/cell network, then they would have caused people to stop paying call charges en masse. Although this is the natural future of cell phones, and everyone knows this, the network operators would probably assassinate Steve Jobs if he tried that today).

So, Skype is – effectively – a “wifi-only” application.

20 million devices cannot be ignored

But wait … there’s more. The iPhone platform has an installed userbase of almost 40 million handsets as of first quarter 2009 (yes, that’s only 20% less than the entire global sales PS3 and 360 combined; the iphone is already one of the top games consoles in the world; Sony (Computer Entertainment) is doomed, and Nintendo’s cash days are numbered, even though they’ll make loads of cash for the next 3 years – the DSi was defunct due to iPhone *before it launched*, so after those few years, the cashflow will drop off / vanish).

But … around half of those are not iPhones, but iPod Touch’s. This is very important to understand: the two devices are compile time identical, and *almost* feature identical. They are more similar than almost any pair of cell phones in the world, even ones from the same manufacturer. And by default all iPhone developers are writing code that runs seamlessly on the iPod Touch – it doesn’t (usually) “break” on iPod Touch if it uses an unsupported iPhone-only feature … rather, that part of the app silently is ignored.

So … nearly all those iPhone developers are actually also iPod Touch developers. Many of them deliberately steer clear of using iPhone-only features. Some of them (myself included) write their apps to cleverly detect whether they’re on an iPod Touch, and work around the limitations (it’s not hard – e.g. if I can’t upload scores to the game server because I’m on a Touch that isnt in wifi range, I save it and upload it next time the phone is online. As a bonus, this makes my games work “better” on iPhone when the iPhone has to go offline, e.g. when it goes on an airplane).

NOT “iphone App”, but “Wifi App”

Back to the point… There aren’t many Wifi-only Apps out there on iPhone … yet.

But there will be. More and more of them. And this summer, when Apple brings out the 3.0 update for iPhone, making ad-hoc discovery much easier (i.e. my phone will be able to auto-detect / find your iphone when they’re in the same room), wifi-local Apps will blossom.

A simple example: real-time fast-action games.

e.g. a Racing Game, that works like this:

1. I persuade you to download the free version
2. We each click on the icon on our own phones
3. The phones magically discover each other, without either of us doing anything, within a couple of seconds
4. We start playing a high-speed racing game – e.g. Need for Speed, or Midnight Club – over the local wifi network
5. The net code works beautifully, there’s no lag, everything updates very fast and smoothly
6. When we finish, the free version you downloaded pops up to say “you played with your friend because he/she had the paid version. If you want to play with different friends, one of you will need to buy the paid version. Click here to buy (one click, instant download)”.

All that is possible, and relatively easy, come summer 2009. You *can* attempt to do it over a 3G network, but it’s hard. But as a wifi-only app it becomes easy. Guess what’s going to happen?

The future of local free wifi

I predicted around 30-40 million iPhone* devices sold by now, and Apple’s 37 million official figure made me look clever (although admittedly it was only a 6 months extrapolation and a 33% error margin I quoted there ;)). I predicted around 75-100 million sold by the same time 2010, and I’ve noticed a lot of other people have come up with the 100 million estimate for 2009 since the official 37 million figure came out.

So, although I think it’s optimistic to expect 100m by the end of the year, I’m confident it’s going to be close. 100m wifi enabled game consoles sitting in cafes, restaurants, bookshops, trains, buses, hotel lobbies, city squares, pubs, etc.

Oh, and don’t forget – that iPod Touch, with no “network contract” to pay for, is a perfect gift for kids. Plenty of people have lined up to tell me that kids can’t afford them; the market research that consistently shows under 18’s as the second largest demographic for iphone* ownership suggest that’s an ill-informed opinion. So there’ll be a lot of those devices sitting in the hands of bored children / used to keep them occupied while parents are doing other things. And we all know how strong a child’s “pestering power” can be.

Monetize local wifi? Screw that; who can be bothered to monetize it when it becomes as essential a driver of custom to your store as having coke/pepsi/coffee on the menu (even though you’re actually, e.g. a bookstore…). Re-think how that affects the “monetization potential” of local wifi (hint: look to the already vast field of *indirectly monetized* Freemium / F2P for inspiration)

So, I’m optimistic. And rather than focus on how “iPhone is going to destroy the cell phone / network operator hegemony, and bring around fair pricing for consumers”, I’m focussing on how it’s going to usher in the long-envisaged era of high-bandwidth, low-latency, high quality console games and apps that focus on the local area. I’m happy with that: I’ve spent almost a decade learning how to make online games for millions of players where the core experience takes place in the local group, so I feel extremely qualified to do well out of this. What about you? What will you be doing with it?

Filed under : entrepreneurship, games design, games industry, iphone, networking, social networking, web 2.0

2 Comments »

Sulka Haro, Sulake

Summary

The intersection between social and gaming, and where that should be going, instead of where lots of people are obsessing about taking it.

(I have more to add here later, but I’ve got to run to a meeting; will update the post when I have time)
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Filed under : GDC 2009, community, design, games design, marketing, reputation systems

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http://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2009/QBlog210309B.html

Your professor tells you that you can’t study them for their own sake. However, if they’re as exciting as you say, and all the young people are reading them, then perhaps you could write an educational one? He therefore instructs you to go away and write a novel to teach addition.

For one of the conferences I was asked to speak at this year, I proposed a talk on the topic:

“Why the Serious Games movement is fundamentally bankrupt based on an idea that will never work, and what you should be doing instead, because there’s some great stuff you’re doing under that banner – but only when you undermine or ignore the classic definition(s) of Serious Games”

Unsurprisingly, they didn’t accept it. They kept on asking me to talk on something more “positive” and “business encouraging”; I kept on replying that it needs to be said, that it would be more valuable to their audience than anything else I personally could talk meaningfully on, and that if they didn’t want it, fine. Not my loss. Ah well.

(and to those of you who are doing great stuff and calling it Serious Games, but not following the foolishness of the majority – well done, keep it up, and we’re looking forward to what you come up with next!)

Filed under : conferences, education, games design

2 Comments »

I’m very tempted to make this:

http://gizmodo.com/5172615/iphone-os-30-will-turn-your-phone-into-a-revolutionary-sex-toy?skyline=true&s=x

…with particular emphasis on the social / avatar / chat / networking features.

Filed under : amusing, computer games, design, games design, iphone

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http://www.apple.com/iphone/preview-iphone-os/

Developers will have the tools to enable in-app purchases — like subscriptions, additional game levels, and new content.

Strangely enough, this makes things a lot easier for me. Now we can stop treading carefully around the “can’t use the revenue models we know and love and have been using for years” problem on iPhone and use all that knowledge we’ve already got.

I wait to get the new SDK and see how true to the promise the reality will be…

Filed under : games design, iphone

1 Comment »