Now that the submission / selection process for GDC 09 is coming to an end, here’s a few thoughts on the new process (CMP / Think Services substantially reformed the conference-submission process this year):
(if you haven’t been following, I periodically write something about ways we can improve the games industry conferences)

1. About this time of year I would normally be thinking “I really need to start on the details of my talk now. Given how busy I am, I’ll need 3 weeks to practice it, and do one final re-write before the conf”. Instead? I’m thinking: “my talk is already written. I have nothing left to do!”. Cool! It’s great to have one less big thing to do…
2. …except, of course, there is something left to do: I need to add all the graphics and do a run through to make sure it all makes sense and flows. I hope the new process hasn’t lulled me into a false sense of security.
3. …AND: usually when I get to a conference, I only got the final polish on the presentation 1-3 weeks earlier (depends how busy I was; sometimes I get fed up with it the night before, and I do some big changes a mere 3 hours before the talk. Especially true if I’m jetlagged and I wake up on the morning of the talk at 4 am anyway) – so it’s all fresh in my mind; I know this is common for a lot of speakers (we’re all busy people, and we don’t get paid for this, so have to fit it in around our day jobs). I have a semi-photographic memory, so I can usually give a talk even if I lost all the slides. This gets offset by the jetlag from flying 6,000 miles to California, and the inevitable hangovers from the GDC parties. In the end it all works out as “OK”; I wonder if it’ll be harder this year? (I wrote the whole talk 6 months before the conference!)
4. CMP’s organization didn’t quite work this year – they missed their own deadlines for reviewing talks and getting back to speakers by 1-2 months. I’ve asked around among friends who are speaking too, from really niche talks to keynoters, and although there is some variation by “importance” of talk (the bigger name, the sooner you heard back, *mostly*), everyone got their responses much later than we were told we would. Shrug. We’re used to this :) – and this is a new way of handling the organization, so I’m sure there were lots of teething problems and unexpected holdups. We’ll just have to see if it goes closer-to-schedule next year, when they’ve debugged it a bit.
5. The accidents that lead to CMP exposing on their website the earliest talks as they were confirmed made for a really interesting lead-up (for other speakers, who could briefly see what was appearing). I’ve already had 3 or 4 mass emails from CMP this year “announcing” batches of new talks that were “just confirmed”. This is standard marketing practice (and they do it each year). But it’s so 1990.
   • Howabout an RSS feed that shows each *individual* talk the moment it goes on the system? That would be awesome and … here’s a headsup to CMP: I would actually bother to read it!
   • These mass-emails of hilighted talks bore the tits off me: with 300+ talks, and one of your marketing dept picking 5-10 they “think” we’d all be interested in, for me as an individual, they get it wrong nearly every time … with all 10 of their picks. It’s statistically practically guaranteed! Theirs is a hopeless task, one I don’t envy. Give us an RSS feed! :)
   • BONUS: if you RSS feed it, you’ll *allow* the chance of news outlets picking up on each and every interesting talk as and when it’s announced. IMHO, you’d actually get overall more exposure. Since you wouldn’t need to “pick and choose”, you’d also be more likely to big-up the interesting talks by accident, since at the moment you just kill the news on them, instead of supporting it.

Also, this year I will once again be mobilizing every industry-insider I can to blog their own detailed writeups of every session they go to, via the Games Industry Conglomerate RSS Feed Of Awesomeness (feed will be updated nearer the time).

(FYI: we’re fed up of non-professionals reviewing conference talks, and either reporting what they’re told without realising when a developer is bullshitting them, or adding their own interesting but often uninformed opinions. We do love them for reporting it, and doing their best – but if you’ve never developed or published a game, there’s *so much* you can’t help but fail to appreciate about what you’re listening to. Sorry. This is not a marketing conference, its a development conference; we need developers reporting it (in addition to the journalists).

For a long period recently they didn’t even bother writing up transcripts of the sessions – so all the world was left with was a summary through the mind of someone who didn’t know what they were looking at. For some talks that’s fine, but at the world’s biggest game-conference for Professionals, with tons of detailed talks and subtle acts of brilliance, it’s just Not Enough.

No more! We transcript, and we comment, and some of us even like to bitch (and praise) quite openly about what’s being put out by the speaker.)

I’m at ION 2008 at the moment, the conference-formerly-known-as-Online-GDC. Just like with GDC, I’m doing full writeups for each session I’m attending. Watch this tag / RSS feed…

Speakers: Karen Chelini, SCEA; Jason Pankow, Microsoft; Matthew Jeffrey, EA

I didn’t stay more than about half the session – my laptop battery ran out, so I couldn’t take any more notes. I’m writing this up really only because there was one key point that came up which illustrates something that CMP and their GameCareerGuide.com do often which hugely angers me, and I want to see changed. They not only spread a rumour that is blatantly not true, but I keep meeting undergraduates and students wanting to break in to the games industry who are in danger of having years of their lives wasted because of this misinformation.

Which is a real pity, because other than that I think GameCareerGuide.com is fantastic. I wouldn’t have written an article for them if I didn’t believe in them and in what they do (generally).

Q: Horror stories?

Jason: I asked why the applicant was interested in games:

“I just think that people who go home and play games after working on them all day are nuts.”

karen: interviewing animators, one had coursework that was “too large” to bring in, so we had to go visit it. It was a ship model with a real dog’s head on it. Couldn’t work out how on earth this was related to 3d animation.

matthew: really strong game designer, loved the sims, will wright got in the lift, and the candidate froze, and they went and gave him a hug. Hero worship at its worst.

Q: Name for us an entry-level job title that you hired for in last 6 months

matthew: junior producers, junior game designers, junior software engineers. We’re desperately hiring graduates [Adam: and he went on and on about how much they were hiring. I've noticed he does this. I would quite like him at my company, he's very good at going to conferences and using his talks as a hiring pitch :). Cheeky, but he just about gets away with it]

Q: You really can get into games at the entry level? We’re told this is a myth

[this is what really pisses me off about CMP and their various outlets every time they talk about games industry jobs - they lie outrageously about it. I have come to suspect it's because they make lots of money out of selling guides to "breaking-in", because it's been so obviously not true for a good 5 years now. I don't really believe that - it's just I'm finding it harder and harder to accept that they really believe what they say in the face of so much evidence to the contrary!]

matthew: yes, you can. A great game designer can come from anywhere, you can’t predict it like you can with programmers, so yes.

karen: yes for art

michael: if you can code, then you can code, that’s what happens. If you can write the code we ask, you’re hired. But computer science degrees are very very good for those interested in a career in it.

Computer Games degrees

matthew: strongly advise you to be suspicious about the quality of the degrees that are not traditional. Very tempting for academics to think they can setup games degrees, but I say to the professors what the heck are people going to do with a games degree if they don’t get a job in the industry? Is it good for anything else?

Karen: I’ll look at someone with a good degree way beyond anyone without

Q: Name a job you’ve hired for over and over again?

matthew: software engineer

[everyone else agreed]

Q: Who are your ideal people? What made someone stand out?

michael: Resume [aka CV] intrigued me because even though it had no games industry experience it said “go to my website and look at the FPS I programmed”. She now works for Windows Gaming.

karen: it’s the projects that you work on, that will make a difference. Looking for highlights in your school career

matthew: so many people don’t put their best work forward when applying. That’s insane – we get hundreds of demo reels a week, so we only see the first 30 seconds initially, a few minutes if it’s good, and that’s what you’re judged on.

Q: is it OK to send resumes to companies where there’s no job posted?

michael: short answer is yes, we will. Ultimately however you will have to apply to an open position because of US govt legal requirements. We will funnel a resume through to an actual job if we like it, so it’s OK, but it can be a bit convoluted.

karen: its about timing, so by the time you’ve applied the job might exist, or not. applying more than once through a website is never going to hurt you

matthew: no company is going to turn away top talent

Q: I’m afraid my CS degree may not be attractive to the industry in 4 years time when I graduate – should I be worried?

matthew: CS degree is no loss, games degree might be

what skills are presently / projected to be in high demand?

michael: producers are in crazy high demand in my group right now. People who oversee the project are hugely needed right now.

karen: across the board in our organization, everything is in huge demand because we’re growing so much

matthew: ditto. Never been a better time to come into gaming.

[Adam: I left at this point, no battery left]

The 2008 GDC Group Gathering went well, with approximately 20+ people turning up. We had a quick discussion about SIG activities and then broke out for the standard mingling and networking. Photos + discussion items below.

ARG SIG: what do you want more of?
– post-mortems of actual ARGs
– IRC chats
– summaries of what projects people are currently working on
– news of latest ARG happenings (specifically what ARGs have started/stopped)

Mike Stein is now on the case of post-mortems, hope to see something come out of that soon.

IRC chats – we’ll definitely schedule these more often. I’d also like to index all the chat-logs, probably on the Wiki.

Project summaries – no-one volunteered :(

ARG news – no-one volunteered :(, just need someone to login to the website and post about the occasional new ARGs as they appear (as Wendeth pointed out, a lot of people don’t have time to keep up to date with UnFiction etc, sadly)

Photos

Speakers: Daniel James, Three Rings; Matt Mihaly, Iron Realms Entertainment

Very brief notes…

The roundtable this year was as bad or worse than the last couple of years – probably around 100 people turned up on the first day, crowding out the tiny room, most of whom had no intention of saying a thing, and just wanted to go to a lecture. Ditto on subsequent days, although the room was only 2/3 full on the day I went (but STILL over-zealous CA’s refused to allow people in to the session, I heard afterwards).

CMP / Daniel and Matt – please stop doing this roundtable on its own, do it as a lecture instead, and do a roundtable for the people who genuinely want to talk about it, not listen passively :).

Interesting thoughts

Make the shopping experience in games as enjoyable in and of itself as it is in real life
– social aspect of shared-shopping, so that each purchase has a story behind it

Freestyle are finding that even with the weight of Vivendi behind them they cannot renegotiate better risk deals with credit-card companies when billing outside NA

Wizards of the Coast see that the tiny percentage of people who make the same amount of money living off secondary market as they spend gives everyone else a lot of aspirational power to keep them in the game and keep them buying

If micropayments and virtual goods are king, when will subscriptions die?

Speaker: Jeremy Irish, Groundspeak

Entertaining, with a lot of very small anecdotes, but nothing non-obvious in this talk. Everything he gave as advice you’d probably work out for yourself within your first project without losing time from doing so.

Control…

You are unable to control many of the environmental factors (e.g. weather (!)) in location-based game-design.

[Adam: ...then he explained GeoCaching for newbies, not going to re-hash it here...]

The reward for people doing the hiding was the logging aspect: seeing people visit your cache.

Seeding a critical-mass of locations AND players to interact with seems to be a very good way to get a game running early on.

Multi-caches and puzzle caches: used a sequence of caches that you have to go to one to find the address of the next, etc. Or puzzles to give you intermediary co-ordinates.

[Adam: like TreasureHunt, or PerplexCity's use of puzzles/interactions (those as very distinct types!) to allow web to become a more interesting game. Lots of common-ground with Alternate Reality Games here; not q required part of ARGs, but something that several of them have done in the past, like I Love Bees using GPS locations of payphones for players to find and answer]

Waymarking, as a differnt kind of geocaching: mark something interesting or valuable in real life which isn’t a cache, but instead is something interesting in the world.

Wherigo

Using polygons to map areas of real world to places in the game

[Adam: like an HTML image-map?]

Location

Zork shows the value of “location” as a tool in game-design

You become a lot more reliant on the game-logic to provide the gameplay experienece [it's the only thing you really control, in fact]

Avoid relying too much on the visual aspect (e.g. of the in-hand game-client)

Can’t control player movements, can’t control time flow, etc

Embrace the chaos

Uncontrollable, unpredictable factors:
– weather
– time (roads, shops open and closed at certain times)
– detours and barriers (often unexpected / unknown in advance by designer)
– other people (obstructing the gameplay accidentally)
[Also deliberately, if your game becomes popular!]
– environmental disasters
[this should include political instability in regions, etc]

Motivation is key

– reward the player often to keep them moving, to keep them bothering to go outside
– eing lost takes n the original meaning – player cannot just “eject” the game and be back home, they may really be stuck in the middle of nowhere

“Junkyard Wars” game-design

– pick elements of the physical location to guide your game-design; use what’s available
– blend physical themes with your game-design ot help suspend disbelief

Keep games short

– 2 hours was way too long for a gameplay experience
– 15 minutes is about ideal, it seems
– Serialize your game into 15-minute chapters if you want long games; gives players convenient stopping points
[Adam: the save-point equivalent for an LBG]
– simplify at all costs
[Adam: good advice for an ARG, actually...]

Use local-environment/physical elements

– Combine with virtual items
– use codes from placed or existing items [Adam: e.g. text on a plaque as part of puzzle solution]
– Interact with real-world people, not just objects
[Adam: That's just standard ARG event stuff]

Make players look up
– i.e. get players to look where they’re walking, i.e. straight-ahead, not literally “up”
– Use vibration and sound as notification tools
[Adam: - Too easy to walk around staring at your palm, where your device is]

Reward and punish users

– Making people walk back / backtrack physically is the nastiest punishment of all
– Grading, giving a score based on time-to-complete is a more gentle punishment / risk/reward item

Create real-world timers
– Game can’t stop because the real world doesn’t start
– Players will happily pause / exit the app, to then cheat
– But also powerful for plot advancement, and for increasing the sense of a “world” taking place in-game

GPS

Challenges
– some GPS phones require cell phone signal for GPS to function (argh)
– GPS signal-bounce can make the client suddenly report instantaneous massive jumps – must be careful not to dump them out of interaction by taking the reported signal literally
– Bugs can include e.g. infinite loop that had players run back and forth between two spots. They weren’t impressed
Physical
– physical game-pieces can be moved unexpectedly: even massive statues get moved
– geocaching after 9/11 met lots of societal problems
– Marketing campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force caused fears of bombs

Alternatives to GPS
– Wi-fi positioning
– cell towers
– [+ a bunch of others that weren't worth mentioning really]

Cheats

– NMEA output faking
– Physically moving Wi-Fi hotspots
– “Dark” areas
– …some of these may be UNintentional
[Adam: you need to recognize early on that the player has primary power, you do NOT: the player may choose at any time not to play, and anything you do to try and prevent that is doomed to failure and also a really bad idea from game design perspective. c.f. Majestic and some of the scathing criticism]

[Adam: very powerful for selling the increased footfalls to e.g. a particular shopping mall]

Speaker: Derek French

Given the title, this talk came far short of my expectations. At the end of the talk I also felt extra annoyed that it felt like half the talk was just waffle, mostly towards the end with lots of repetition of the same vague opinions over and over again.

HOWEVER … when I came to clean up my notes and post them here, I realised that there were a lot of concrete good points, and it was just that it got waffly at the end.

If you don’t bother reading everything below, there’s one thing I want you to read (NB: I have cut out big chunks of the talk where the speaker waffled too much, so the reading below should be information-heavy).

“We have a live team: you need one too” – he said this right at the end, and this is for NORMAL (non-MMO) games. Commentary in-line at that part of the talk, but I think it’s a very very good thing to be saying and for games companies (publishers ESPECIALLY) to be thinking about right now.

Or … don’t. It’ll make it easier for us in the MMO space to take away your customers in the offline space if you don’t, so I’d be happy with that.

Think of this as: “Introduction to using and abusing your community tools for a game”. Maybe it’s just because in MMO development most of what he said became common knowledge a long time ago that I wasn’t impressed, but that doesn’t change the fact it’s got some good points and useful to anyone who hasn’t done this stuff before.

Emails

Multiple accounts per email address was a mistake. Screws up your metrics, stats, datamining.

[Adam: this makes no sense to me at all - this shouldn't interfere with any of metrics, stats, etc, unless you made a bad mistake with how you designed the concept of "identity", "authentication" etc in your rools]

Moderators

One of our cardinal rules: if you ask to be a moderator, we deny. The kind of people who want that kind of power are the bad mods. So we just look for people who post good posts consistently, are polite, helpful, etc. We have no requirements for them to work at given times, etc.

Forum constraints

One thing we took further was e.g. for swear filter certain words we didn’t want just to censor, we had to add excpetions. We found the town of Calimshite, and Cockatrices, caused lots of problems.

We don’t just use swear filter for bad words, we use it to cut out gold selling spam, etc.

We used a points value for the words, and if your post scores 10 points or more, we junk it immediately. So then people would go back and re-edit to optimize it.

So, then we banned you for X hours where X = number of points in your score. See you in the morning!

e.g. when Australian release was a month later than everywhere else, someone complained with great venom, got banned for about 700 hours…

Interfering and accepting

With good, consistent, fair, safe rules and constraints and moderation of your forums, you’re going to make your players love to be there on the forums.

We allow people to disagree with us, to criticise us – so long as they do it respectfully – because that fits within the community, it doesn’t damage the overall value of the forums. We want everyone to feel comfortable there about talking about our games.

Patching and updaters

For NWN, we knew we’d need some kind of patching system. We felt we didn’t want to push patches because of all the modding. So, we built a custom updater where everything was in small chunks and people could manually trigger it.

Even with auto-patching you always have to have a manual update system for the cases where something goes wrong, where you make an accident with the patch or packaging.

Many interesting ideas people have about monetizing the updater, or requiring you be logged-in to community site etc – but the truth is if there’s something broken that MIGHT be fixed by the current patch, you want to get right out of the customer’s way and let them get the patch as quickly and effortlessly as possible, or they’re probably going to get even unhappier and quit.

NWN launch

Dev team took some time off before starting expansion patches, time for live team to take over and get going.

Started using the forums and bug-reporting to gather info on the game, triage issues, and sending bugs etc back to dev team. After doing this for a while found that our own live team programmers were able to do their own builds, their own updates, and work in parallel with the dev team.

[Adam: again, this sounds weird to me, because in the MMO world "live team" has a very specific meaning and there's a much better handover between dev team and live team: usually the live team has so many of the original dev team members initially that they are largely indistinguishable until people gradually move to other projects. Interesting to think about whether / how soon traditional game-dev teams will adopt the MMO model of merged dev/live teams...]

99% of UGC is crap

[Adam: not the speaker's summary for this section, mine]

In early days we found the community was making a lot of almost cookie-cutter modules: entrance, monster, treasure – and that’s it. So I took a designer on our mod team and asked them to make something crazy, do something unexpected, to demonstrate exactly how powerful Aurora was, to kickstart the community creativity.

He made a M:tG clone, and a bunch of other things, about 8 different really creative modules in a month. And then we suddenly saw some really interesting and creative modules coming out of the community.

Supporting a creative community

There were several times we thought they couldnt’ do stuff, and they did it.

creatures – too hard, but they did.
tilesets – they have no idea what the file format is, but they reverse engineered it
nothing of grand scale – someone made a 300 foot scale module, and we were floored by it, it was incredible.

[Adam: obvious. Not worth mentioning. But ...]

So … we did anything we could to support them: gave them proper fileformat definitions, provided data, documentation, etc.

People complained there was no database, so we put in a simplified database layer.

[Adam: anyone seeking to do modern community / web 2.0 / social networking systems would do well to look at that list and think carefully of another dozen or so items that would hide inside that "etc" - and I'd like to see a talk where someone focussed on that entirely]

Overall, quid pro quo with community: they find needed features, we developed them. We’ve released 21 full updates across 3 OS’s, worked really well overall.

You can’t mandate tools

How do community create content? With YOUR tools? Maybe.

We had to put in more error checking than originally expected. (we expected them to use our tools, community went and wrote their own, so the content wasn’t going through our editor’s built-in error checking, so we had to add stuff to verify content that was crearted externally)

Non-game utils

We noticed a mistake: whenever we had gone to make an autorun, launcher, installer, etc, we had basically passed this off to a junior tools programmer, usually in last 3 months of project. What we ended up doing was having the exact same mistakes were made every single time.

I got frustrated because we were repeating bad mistakes, so the live team took over authority for it. So, now we can make this stuff in a few days for a new title, instead of a few months, and we get much richer AND more stable supportive tools for launching games etc.

Launcher is the FIRST THING customers see. That’s the first moment you have to excite or iritate your customer. It’s not something to leave to end of game, or have as low priority. If anyting goes wrong, they enter the game with a bad feeling.

[Adam: when a player first has contact with a game, their opinions are very fluid, they can change rapidly from impressed to horrified and back again. But once that first interaction is past, the opinion begins to cement, and it's harder and harder to make big changes in player opinion. Only, I don't buy that the LAUNCHER experience is going to so materially affect the opinion of the game - playing the game is a NEW experience. So, basically, I agree entirely with the sentiment the speaker expresses, but disagree entirely with the particular claim he makes here]

[Adam: I cut out lots of boring notes here, this was the waffle part of the talk, with sections like "So, we had to develop everything ourselves, and we used what we already had, and it worked fine". Hmm. Why, exactly, would I care that you did "something", "somehow", and that it all went "OK"? There's just no information content for most of this part of the talk. Nevermind - you don'thave to read it! :)]

Future live team

To date, an independent group outside the other game teams. We want to embed ourselves into the next project – probably Dragon Age – work with them and leverage our previous experiences.

COD4’s RPG elements, Wow’s armory – we’re looking forwards to developing even more cool community / website integration for dragon age. Can’t talk about specifically what, but it’s great.

[Adam: /me is annoyed because the "future live team" section was basically empty on any actual info about the future. If you can't talk about it, then DON'T MENTION IT. Your secret projects, about which you won't tell us anything, are less exciting to us than you think they are. Sigh]

We have a live team: you need one too!

[Adam: I would be tempted to delete the rest of these notes and just leave that one line up there. Kudos to the speaker (he stuck it up right at the top of the slide, in big letters). Any game that launches today IS an online game, even if it thinks it isn't - your community is online (even for a single-player game), and you stand so much to gain if you just throw a tiny amount of resource at it. A live team for a non-MMO is, IMHO, worth it's weight in gold. Especially as so many other companies *do not have one* (in the MMO space, we all have them, so having one is not so much of a differentiator over competitor products - it's just an essential, so it's harder to stand out)]

Organizing options:
– separate independent team
– embedded in game team

[Adam: there's loads more options than that: strike teams, split-by-project, split-by-expertise, technology-lead, feature-lead, community-lead, etc. But I guess this is just something that MMO people are more experienced with, so we can think of more options]

Mandate
– this is essential: what are the boundaries of their responsibility and work
– one area is support: if your dev team or publisher cannot provide the level of support you want for your title, you can make forums, knowledgebase systems, etc.
– patch releases: again, if game dev or publisher cannot/will not do it, you can take control of it and do it well
– non-game utilities: …again if quality isn’t what you and the community want, take it over
– post-release content: downloadable content, premium content, etc

Structure
– need a lead
– + selection of people dependent on whatever your mandate was that you chose

Role details
– community manager: you need someone who is very good at interacting not only with game team but also with the commuinity itself. Advocating what game team needs, and helping dev team understand what the community wants. Sanity checks what they are hinking of doing, saying what community will react with.
– lead: lots of good scheduling skills and personnel management. Need to truly understand the areas that you’re working on, dev team needs, and community needs.

Conclusion
– sometimes it’s OK without a live team, but even then you end up with a fairly disconnected community/dev team pairing
– dedicated group of individuals that allows you communicate more effectively between dev and players you get a much more vibrant community and you get much more brand faith
– bioware community is 3.8 million subscribers, been around for 7 years

Q: have you ever had to shut down any community servers (websites, forums, etc)?

No, and no plans to do so. Ongoing operating cost is minimal. Systems are automatically monitored.

Project shutdown: NWN is about to get it’s final patch ever, within the next month. Will have been running for around 5 years now, much more than our expected original run of 1-2 years. Servers will stay up, but will be no further support, no further patches or content updates.

Q: how much have you used your community as a recruitment tool?

We’ve pillaged the community quite violently, we’ve hired people from all over the world from it.

We saw people putting out content that just blew our mind.

A very valuable tool for us.

Q: what was the largest size the team got to?

About nine in total, not including the infrastructure support guys (databases, server maintenance).

4 designers, 1 artist, 2 programmers, and a lead and a community manager.

Q: was it something Atari [their publisher at the time] was willing to pay for to make original live team?

very much an internal project within the developer. Publisher didn’t really notice it existed, it was just we ahppened to be the people within the developer that took responsibility for those things.

We had our own budget, so we needed to justify our continued existence internally.

Q: any problems with console games?

We only really deal with PC versions of our games now. Not really a lot to say for the 360 version right now, we don’t have so much content with the external team that does it, either. Mainly leaving it up to the standard community guys.

We do “self-help” support: a forum for support mainly helping and expecting people will discuss the issues and help themselves. Publishers do the frontline support. Sometimes we fly our support guys to the publisher and have them brief the frontline support people.

Members of our own company pile on the forums themselves. We just can’t help ourselves, we’re so desperate to make sure people enjoy our game.

Q: UGC often includes copyrighted content. Problem?

For the most part we’ll have to contact them and tell them they can’t talk about it on our forums. Since we don’t host ANY UGC, we don’t have to worry about it too much. Neverwinter vault had to deal with those situations quite a few times, because they were actually hosting the files.

That’s a lot of why we decided not to host content ourselves. I think that’s changing now for both us and for other people in the industry. We now have more faith in reporting systems and reactive handling of such problems.

Speaker: Eyjolfur Gudmundsson, CCP

I want a full-time economist working for MY company.

And: CCP staff should give more of the GDC talks, they’re good. And entertaining.

In the midst of a week of depressingly dumb comments (on the topic of economy: what possessed Matt Miller to argue against microtransactions because accountants like to see x million players times y dollar per month and find microtransactions unpredictable?), it was a joy to go to an intelligent, extremely well-informed, rational talk with valuable lessons for the future.

EDIT: photos now added inline; better quality images of almost the same graphs can be found in the official Eve Online newsletters (2007Q3 and 2007Q4)

Anyway, highlights:
– Eve now has almost 0.25 million subscribers and almost 0.5 million game-accounts
– Eve’s free-market, perfect (ish) economy only started working properly when they went over approximately 50,000 players per server: this suggests that sharded games may be doomed to never get good economies
– Trade is inevitable, as are all the side-effects such as inflation and arbitrage: your choice is whether to ignore them or try to use them to the improvement of the game
– The amount of money in your game-world MUST grow in-line with economic activity.
– An Economics Professor working on a major MMO officially stated that virtual items are real items, and gave an economic rationalization. I’m sure this has happened before, but I’m not sure if they noticed yet: sooner or later expect governments, lawyers, and accountants to be very happy indeed. Sob.

Personal extra thoughts:
– Economics is about people – just like socializing and competitive play: good to understand why these things are so important to MMOs
– Do players need EXACTLY the same amount of information that the developers have? (IMHO: probably) This is a new form of an old argument from the 1990’s: should RPG’s/MMO’s let players see their character stats? Nowadays it’s: should MMO’s let players know the metrics data that the designers are using to tweak the game?
– Dr. Gudmundsson needs to put his economics reports in a more web-friendly maner (PDF sucks, but XHTML would be good…)
– CCP needs to “get with the web” and have e.g. an “economics reports page” where you can download ALL the quarterly reports (oops, my bad – thanks to CrazyKinux for the link), as well as web-based streaming of price indices etc – even if massively time-delayed – I couldn’t find any such thing on google :(

Introduction

As a former economics professor, I’m unaccustomed to having so many people flocking into a lecture, so thank you for coming.

This talk is from myself and Sam Lewis from Cartoon Network, Dan Speed from CCP – they have the games industry background and I have the economics.

CCP: 300+ employees, and no one works there – “You simply live it!”. We work to the common goal of making EVE the best place online in the world.

Eve: 225,000 subscribers and groiwing, with 460,000 characters today, all on one single shard. And … it’s gorgeous.

Economics

Why is economics important for an MMO? Because it’s about people, and if you ever get pople coming together, you get trade, and trade begets an economy.

Principals: scarcity, economic behaviour – the individuals in the environment, and the conditions for a perfectly competitive market. I think these are the three most important principles for an MMO.

But also … fun. Economics and business is fun gameplay – the Stock Market is just one big game.

The functioning of your economy is fundamental to the success of your game, to keep the people playing together.

If you do not believe me, go to the original source, Richard Bartle (2004). [Adam: my typing isnt fast enough, not a perfect quote] “although it’s not hard to see why an economy design might fail, it’s much harder to find one that wouldn’t fail”.

Further support: Ed Castranova: “the very process of making a choice under scarcity is enjoyable” (2005).

Scarcity

Why not make an MMO where you can have everything? Real life is all about things you can’t have. Wouldn’t a perfect game give you everything in the game, absolutely everything you want, straight away?

For most people, the pleasure is in the journey, not the destination. The same is true for gameplay – we want some benefit from our hard work online, and we want to see it, we want it to be measurable.

If everything is free, the marginal utility is 0 (from economic theory). or, more simple to remember, the pleasure is in teh journey.

Behaviour

We have to remember the individuals – that you cannot make their decision, you have to allow them complete freedom of choice of what they will do.

Individuals will be evaluating options given the constraints, many not necessarily on the game world, all aspects of their time, money, etc. We call the results of these evaluations “prices”.

There are as many potential objectives as there are avatars, not just players, because as a given avatar, they have different constraints, even if desires were the same.

Market

[Adam: here he did a basic explanation of perfect competitive market]

The question becomes: do we really want a perfect competitive market?

Most MMOs have homogeneuos products – same name has exactly the same qualities. Even enhanced items honour this, because it’s a different item.(one of those)

Breaking the basic rules of economminsc often results in fun gameplay – hiding information, creating monopolies, and profit distribution held in concentrated few. Don’t people want to become the Bill Gates of their game world (not possible with a perfect economic market).

So … you really do want to break the rules. So … that’s why you want to hire me.

Advanced topics from economic theory that MMOs need to start dealing with these days:
Monetary theory, Trade theory (real world to virtual ), Labor theory (return from gameplay, benefit from extra minute spent online)

Eve history

Integrated the economic design with the core game design from start of production

High security / safe zone as centre of universe, where players start playing.

All resources are assymetrically distributed, forcing trade.

Four major trade areas have been chosen by the players, not by CCP, because it’s a sandbox game and those areas emerged from the bheaviours of the players.

Opted for player-driven and dynamic economy so that it would mould to the activities of the players. Controlled economny failed for Eastern Bloc, it will fail in your MMO.

Contracts in EVE are possible but not perfect, and the loan system too we could improve.

Here’s an example of why real assumptons sometimes fail: contract job, standard procedure is that you put up collateral that is at least the value of teh googs you’re moving. This comes down to the fact that trust is not something that was designed in Eve – it’s always easy to cheat the otehr player.

However, a small population cannot support an effective market.

So, all items INITIALLY were produced and sold both by players and by NPCs.

As population grew, items were withdrawn. Currently more than 90% of all items are produced and sold by plaeyrs. Benchmark at 30-000 to 50-000 players before the market starts to work – so … think how that works or not with sharded servers.

All major spaceships etc if there is no player making it at the moment then it simply is not available.

Example: blueprints and inventions

Higher blueprints were originally distributed through lotteries – do the quest but may or may not get BP at end.

This created monopoly for the production of certain tech 2 items. As intended!

We then introduced an invention process, so players with tech1 BPs could convert them at cost to tech2.

As soon as we added inventions, and players started upgrading BPs, the price of tech1 didn’t change but tech2 dropped by 40%.

Real-life economic theory perfectly predicted this happening.

Perfect information

Eve
– historical pricing information availalbe, but regional so you have to travel to find it all
– long term planning is possible

20 day average price, 5-day avg price, dots samples for average price that day, range of pricing that day, and the trade volume.

This was cloned from the NASDAQ reports [Adam: e.g. for Microsoft here].

WoW:
– short-term server information (48 hours max auction time)
– long-term planning very difficult

Both fit well for the function for which they’re intended. So … let intended game mechanics control the level of information available. Design your economy to go hand-in-hand with the game-design, don’t just take a “perfect” economy and try to force it on every game design.

Tritanium pricing.
– as soon as we allowed decimal changes in the ISK price,you saw fluctuations
– between 1.5 and 3 per unit
– years later we realised that in-game mechanics allowed you to refine an item and recieve at a specific price, and that that was capping the price for tritanium.
– those that read the newsletters [Adam: first one here] will know I also want to fix another example of accidental price-cap

Supply Changes

Zydrine
– sarted at 4k isk
– then a new area opened up with an easier way to get zydrine from kills
– …so a fall in price
– until may/june 2007 when it bottomed out, so game designers tried out new drop tables and put it on the test server.
– didn’t announce anything, just put it on PTS
– players noticed, and within 2-3 days, prices on LIVE server had doubled.
– this is a good example of the perfect information leading to major price changes
– they then stabilized around 10% lower than that.

Demand changes

Torpedoes
– we made a game design change to make torpedos shorter range
– cruise missiles incresed in price by 2.5 x, currently still dropping, but around 1.8 times original
– torpedoes dropped by factor of 4, no increase yet

Metrics

Designing and running an MMO is all about metrics. But … so is economics.

Reports needed:
– total trade
– most traded items
– identifying cash transfers
– relative change in rank and magnitude of individual items

Inflation

To prevent inflation problems, youi need price indices.

We have four major price indices that we publish quarterly in the newsletter, and I hope we will eventually publish live price index information, but its just my dream right now although its possible.

When I joined, players believed there was inflation, so one of the first things I did was to start calculating inflation measures.

– mineral price index (MPI)
– primary producer price index (PPPI)- items that need minerals
– secondary producer price index (SPPI)- items that need PPPI
– consumer price index (CPI)- end items, spaceships etc

[Adam: frustratingly, CCP seems to have no URL for any of those, not even defining them, let alone giving historical data :(]

First thing we noticed: deflation in the MPI.

Three small blips, one for each expansion pack. So, although overall economy is defalting, when ltos of people play at expansion pack, you get a termporary blip which is what people notice.

In 2007 – overall 14% deflation due to dropped production costs due to more people producing and competing.

Think about early 80’s in airline travel in US. When that was all freed up, prices dropped by 50% or more over the next 3 years, and you started to see the low-fare airlines come in. Exactly the same thing we’re seeing in EVE: large influx of players causes drop.

But, prices have recently started to increase (last 2 months), so I’m watching this very carefully to see what’s going on and react if necessary.

GUP – Gross User Product

Used basic GDP measures, worked with the Helsinki institute of information technology to adapt to virtual worlds.

At same time as subscription is growing hugely, inflation/deflation in reasonable limits, GUP is increasing slightly => the economy is healthy.

Money MUST grow inline with economic activity

Simple to say, but very difficult to implement in an MMO (in real life as well!)

Need a system in place that ietnifies accelerated flows of cash into the economny.
– changes in cash earnings per minute on-line
- by skills / levels

Need sinks so you have something you can tweak to change this

Must avoid reducing the perceived benefits of anything repetitive that earns – people build up expectations of the value and the reward, so taking actions can have extra effects if you upset the PEOPLE that drive the economy.

Inflation is not necessaruly a bad thing – if it affects everyone equally, and not redistriubting the wealth substantially, then it is fine.

Lessons learned

– Use economic theory, but adjust it to YOUR game design
– Constantly monitor the system – not enough just to make it well at first, must keep adapting and tweaking it

Future

Trying to have bigger game population than population of Iceland: i.e. we need to beat 350,000.

That will change the society greatly – and I want you to realise that MMOs *are* societies.

We’re making changes to provide support to the society as it grows in size.

Emerging society with it own social, pilitical and financial instituations.

In Iceland we’ve had democracy since 930 AD, so we’re hoping that Eve will grow and thrive with a democracy.

Still want to add Futures, but we will need much more advanced financial institutions, so that will take time to happen before futures are feasible.

Will MMOs become their own world, or will they be based on real-world institutions?

Linden turned to real-life instiatutions, last year they said no-one can be a bank in SL without being a bank IRL, to fix their in-game banking problems.

Value in a virtual world is real because the players are real.

[ARGH!]

[Adam: he also mentioned the ability to cash-out virtual items as real-world equivalents as a possible future direction. More like Magic:the Gathering's ability to get real-world cards from the virtual world purchases, I think, than the simpler, more obvious, less powerful scheme of SL's and Entropia's taking out of cash.

Q: why must money grow in line with activity

If not, more people will have more money and cause extra inflation, and gradually shut-out the influx of newer players

Q: I play auctioneer in WoW. In chinese new year the prize of gold out of game doubled because the farmers were all viiting their family and not around to farm gold right then. Do you monitor the external forces and deal with them?

From the numbers that I have today it's not substantially effecting the gameplay, yet.

Q: Do you consider OOG knowledge as a bug or a feature?

In EVE that's anticipated and hoped-for - I cant say that officially, as its not my job, but knowing the guys that do I'd say it's quite fun for us to see.

Q: Gold-dupe bug: how would you deal with that at the economic level?

Won't talk about specifics. We have had cases like that. The key is making sure that your tools on CS side are good. Tracking things back, reversing things.

Essential to find out and react as SOON as possible. Spot it, flag it, track it back, and react.

We're much less effected by these things because people are intelligent and don't do too much, so not so bad, or they do too much and we see it very early and stop it very early.

Q: Would you subtract money from people who'd benefitted? Or would you knock the worst people and hope it smoothed out?

Yes. And I can't say any more.

Q: Couldn't these advanced financial systems be developed by players?

Yes, they could, but there's an issue of trust. You need someone that the players can trust absolutely.

There are a few people that have built-up a very good reputation. On the forums they only argue with "read my record". But that's a very scarce resource (trusted players) in Eve - eve players are generally not trustable.

Q: Goldfarming - with economists on the team, it would seem that farmers are simply part of supply and demand. So, what is too far, when does it become damaging?

As an economist, I also believe that drug trades should be made free. So, although I might agree with you, not many players may necessarily agree with us.

You earn your status in blood, sweat, and tears - this is what hte players believe. Since they believe it, we support it - so we go after the farmers because that's what a fundamental part of what they believe.

[Adam: seems to me he was saying that it's a part of the fundamentals of the *society* they've built, since he believes that each MMO is a society, so they have a responsibility to intervene to help support the society, rather than because they like intervening in arbitrary bits of game design/gameplay (CCP infamously doesn't interfere in an awful lot of player-player griefing)]

Q: do you actively control the amount of money that is ciruclating, and how do you add/remove?

Players mostly do the adding through doing missions.

We only monitor what is going out, and if not enough then we add additional sinks (which he didn’t outline).

If you have a very dynamic economy, then you will find that an NPC based system will tend to break. So you either have to tweak things over time or have extremely adaptable NPC systems.

Speaker: Susan Wu, Charles River Ventures + panellists, see below for details

EDIT: just finished an editing round; I’m about 2/3 through cleaning this up. That’s why it all goes a bit funky towards the end. I promise I’ll clean up the rest of it ASAP…

Excellent panel, probably the most informative one I’ve been to at GDC (I usually find they wander too much and have too little concrete info. Nabeel, if you read this, I’m not counting your moderated session as a panel ;))

Lots of great info for anyone looking to make a games industry startup. It wasn’t made into a theme deliberately, but I noted a thread throughout that VC’s will very happily pay for games companies, BUT on the flip-side they’re only looking at games companies that have a lot more than just a single product, that have a future. As they said, they’re looking at minimum for a business that could realistically eventually grow to making $100 million a year in revenue – anything less, and you shouldn’t be going for VC money.

I’ve got a bunch of other comments, but I’m so exhausted at this point I can’t write them up now. I’ll come back to this post and edit or comment on it later. Perhaps next week, or next month – when I’ve recovered from the conference. But I wanted to get initial draft up now…

Personal backgrounds

Matt Mihaly

Background is periphery of games industry, text muds at IRE. Started sparkmeida couple of years ago and spun off as separate company when we realised we needed more money than we thought. Raised 4 million, which was a shock as I’ve never done more than freinds and family before

Jason Hable

I spent 6 years at crescendo ventures, one of the backers of ARea. recovering VC, I’ve been clean for 5 months. HAven’t spent time raising money for areas, but was on the other side of the table for years.

Emily Greer

Not games at all, I was direct marketing and ecommerce. My brother decided that kongregate would be more fun than selling thngs. Raised angel about $1 – $1.2 million closed march 2007. $5 million series B that closed in august.

Nabeel Hyatt

this is my 5th startup, all different industries, all about consumers and entertainment and media. Done every kind of startup experience. Did garage and grew it. Did one in 2001, no-one would give us money, went to VCs 18 times before someone gave us money, went a year with no salary. Conduit was a very fast and quick process this time. Came into it from a resident entrepreneur position at [something].

Q: matt – why was the process painful?

When we started raising capital we were warned it was a fulltime job. In fact it was 3 full time jobs. Spent every waking moment refining documents, having 8 or 9 meetings with each single firm, and god knows how many firms. And everyone we met wanted to see something new, wanted a tweak in one area, a new kind of spreadsheet somewhere else, all before they’re willing to take it to their board.

I’m sure there’s a way to be easy, but I think the main thing is if my expectations had been more realistic.

Q: What advice would you give yourself with hindsight?

I tried to be quite open with the VCs, but I don’t think I was open enough. Had two deals om the table at the end, turned out that I hadn’t been clear enough with the term sheet and pushing back and saying that certain terms were just unaccepatable. I was afraid that I couldn’t push back.

Now I realise that once they’re interested, you have to beat them off with a stick, so I should have pushed back harder.

Q: Nabeel – ditto?

Biggest advice I always give is that pretty much every analogy you have to dating applies.

Play hard to get – having more than one person interested in you – faking it if you only have one person interested – they all work.

You’ll know if people are really interested, they’ll be completely on top of you.

(Susan: once we’re in the third meeting, then we’re really committed. Jason is no longer a VC, so he can tell the secrets.)

Flip side is that there are VCs who keep you going 9 times, but they’re just stringing along. Entrepreneurs like that you have 2 or 3 vcs their talking to, but if they’ve had 5 or 6 meetings each and aren’t jumping you, then they’re not real.

(Jason: VC’s are notoriously bad at not saying no, but saying maybe: “why don’t you go look at market X for a month and come back and tell me about it”. They’re keeping their options open. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s the third meeting, I’d say it’s like that with the company you really like. You know it’s there when you have more than one key person in the meeting, more than just the associate, etc.)

Q: Matt how did you find it coming to VC from a cold start? (the others had good VC contacts already)

(Susan: VCs trust you much more if you get introduced by a meaningful partnership we receive thousands and thousands of approaches a month, so we have to filter.)

1st – anyone who says they’re open to cold calls is full of shit. Sequoia says it on their website, but it is absolutely not true.

A couple of VC firms had got in touch with me, but really I looked at who was attending GDC and the virtual goods conference that Susan put on last year. We tried to figure out which firms were interested in the market we were trying to hit.

Q: give me numbers. Say, you should initially mail 10 firms?

I think we contacted 18 or 19, maybe half through people we knew, half were cold-calls. Most of the cold-calls didn’t work.

We got two meetings just from me posting on their blogs. At least that way they had heard my name before they heard from me. That’s a step above just a random pitch. Anything you can do to make them hear of you is great.

(Emily: Jim wasn’t really an insider. But what he did was to call up every single person he’d ever worked with even 15 years ago, everyone he knew who had done anything with startups.

At conferences, he went to every session and asked the difficult question at the end, and gave his name and company out loud when he did it.)

(Nabeel: instead of using pre-existing VC connections, I went through a process like Jim’s – I narrowed it down to a set of firms interested in that business area. I know a lot of lawyers who think they can refer you in to VC but they can’t)

(Susan: actually there are a couple of lawyers who ARE very trusted, there’s a few that I take very seriously, but you have to find the right ones.)

(Nabeel: Well, find the people they’ve already backed, speak to the entrepreneurs first, get their trust, and their support. To the VC, the opinion of their backed entrepreneurs is the most important to them.)

(Jason: your process starts 6 months before you actually need the money. Worst thing is to pitch them when you’re not ready. Better to go through the process of introducing yourself and making warm connections.)

(Matt: pick some companies you don’t want money from, use them to pick holes in your pitch. Very helpful practice for us before we hit the firm we did care about.)

Q: Nabeel’s advice is very good. Go through the entrepreneurs. They are also interested in you personally – could be a potential hire, could be a potential partner – so they have a good judgement and a vested interest in evaluating you. So that’s the process for foot in door – so whats the process for courtship? How honest are you?

Susan:

At CRV people email us, send us a 1-page exec summary. Sometimes we get 30 page powerpoint presentations. I think the 1 pager is a good way of showing your ability to condense. After that we decide “Is this exciting enough to take it to a first meeting?”, with 1 or 2 partners. Then we have a second meeting with a few more partners. Finally we go to an all-partners meeting, usually on a Monday for some reason at most VCs. At the end of that meeting, they can give you a final yes or no. Meetings 1 to 3 are negotiating, so that by meeting 3 most of the structure and values are MOSTLY worked out, if not completely.

Matt:

Of the four firms we ended up with, some behaved like Susan said, 3 or 4 meetingds process. One of them, one of the final ones, was 8 or 9 meetings – there the person initially meeting us was refining our pitch throughout.

It took a lot of time with him but it was well worth it.

Jason:

For each firm it is different in terms of meetings, but I think with some firms there’s a lot more intermediary meetings, but there are always those 3 key meetings.

It’s about fitting your presentation, your pitch, into the format that that organization wants to hear. You need to make sure you are getting PROGRESS, tangibly more and more people coming to the meetings, and you’ve got to be constantly pushing your associate to take it forwards, what do they need next, when will more people get involved, when is the next major meeting, what do you need to do in time for it, etc

Emily:

For us it was mostly the words you say over the powerpoint, when we figured that out, we went suddenly to the final partner meeting. Also having the demo helped enormously.

Nabeel:

If you walk in and are reliant on just the presentation, if you switch the lights off and just talk through it, then you’ve already lost.

You’re trying to get them sold by looking them in the eyes and convincing them, and you should keep that going as long as possible before being forced to go to the antiseptic part with just powerpoints and presenting.

Susan:

Basically everyone on this platform all do the same exactly: you’re all in the casual mmo area. You’re all doing it differently, and your core team memebers are very different from company to company. I bring this up is because ideas really aren’t exciting, they’re worthless. What’s really exciting is some team is very passionate and has some insight about how to implement that vision

Jason:

That’s definitely true. Having a good team that’s going to be able to navigate around the big ups and downs in the industry, all the unpredictable changes in competitors and market conditions, and yet still steer towards the final vision, that’s really essential.

Matt:

As Nabeel says – it’s a dating process. These are people you’re going to have a relationship for many years.

Susan:

Tere are plenty of people with personality quirks who get funded, in fact I’d say being a bit of a dick in certain ways actually makes you more likely to be a successful enterpreneur.

The right traits are: Passion, integrity, leadership, insight, and devotion.

People who – even if they dont raise money – are going to keep trying until they succeed at the business.

Jason:

Yes, all those things plus: self-awareness. Being able to notice your weaknesses and then bring in people to fill up those things.

e.g. worst thing is a SEo who thinks they’re brilliant at marketing and theyre going to do it so never brings someone in to do it.

Q: What about terms? People think its valuation-focussed, but it isn’t…

[Adam: tersm as in "term sheet", i.e. the details of the funding contract - how much money, for how much percentage of company, and what other contractual clauses etc]

Matt:

A lot of VCs would say “Don’t worry about valuation, take a lower valuation, it doesn’t matter”. I dont buy that.

[Adam: there was a short explanation here of Participitaing Preference, and wrangling over whether it was the VC's double-dipping or not, i.e. getting extra shares in the company for free, as a lot of people assume when they first see it in the term sheet]

(Nabeel: the fact is it’s probably not the last round of money you’re going to raise in the company, and through a series of rounds, valuations tend to even out in the end to what they should be. The valuation resets itself as you hit or miss expectations.

Once you add any clause at one round for one investor, there’s no way any subsequent investor will go without it. So you should of course optimize the earliest round, but to perfectly frank I consider raising moeny to be a major distraction from what I’m trying to do, which is to start a business, so in some sense it doesnt matter, dont worry to much.)

VC wanted us to de-invest some of the money that the founders had put in, to make us better invested [Adam: i.e. take away their shares and then grant them back slowly over time so that they couldn't just cash out]. To me the risk of losing shares I had already paid for in cash was extremely noxious.

Jason – thats one clause that shocks new entrepreneurs, but it’s necessary that you don’t get your shares immediately, but the exact terms of that one are negotiable (some things are not).

Q: whats negotiable?

Jason:

There’s usually some anti-dilution, that’s got to be there, but the actual value can be negotiated.

Founders vesting-rate is another one thats in there, but actual rates negotiable.

A lot of it is market-driven. Based on how much capital is out there, some clauses will get removed if you push back. Important that you have a good attorney, you need someone on your side who can argue against the VC’s professional deal-makers and have the oversight to know what all the other deals this quarter have been, because they’ve been brokering them for other companies, so they know what’s reasonable for current market conditions.

Q: how much should you give away at first and second rounds of financing?

Jason:

Things haven’t changed since I joined a VC in 2001. It’s really because most projects are much more capital-based than they were. The rule of thumb has been to sell 50% in Series A – but Series A rounds now are worth only $2-$3 million, so that’s far too much (to give away).

Susan: I think now VC firms want 25-30% at Series A. It’s not arbitrary – it’s part of the VC business model

[Adam: Susan originally tried to say 25-35, the rest of the panel said quite firmly that VC's will definitely take 20%. Can't blame a VC for trying ;)]

Nabeel: just to put a final point on it, it’s an industry, and most of the standards that have been setup are because the whole industry is moving that way, and I’ve seen entrepreneurs try to fight it. A lot of VC’s blogs let you see the patterns and standards in VC at the moment, and not fight it – Brad Feld, Fred Wilson, VentureHacks

Q: there are of course non-venture sources of money: angels who will take smaller stakes of 5-10%, there are also publishers who will pay you an advance. What about those?

Emily:

We were close to taking early VC as Convertible Debt, it was looking great for delaying some of the valuation stuff until later in the day [Adam: i.e. until a later round of funding]. But we realised there was a lot of strangeness in how the valuation will end up, very complex to predict how it would go, and in the meantime we met Reid Hoffman (a PayPal Director, and the founder of LinkedIn), and we decided to take a deal with him for a lower valuation than we could have gotten, but what we really wanted was his advice and his help.

With the convertible debt, until it was converted, we couldn’t be sure of the alignment of the interests of the VC and of our own [Adam: because until it converts, they're not really bought-in in quite the same way - the flip side of the benefit Emily mentioned of "delaying" some of the negotiations], but with Reid there was certainty of the alignment of our interests straight away, that straight away and from then on, he only wanted us to succeed.

Q: how many angel investors did you have?

emily: 12 angels

susan: angels generally don’t re-invest in the next round, whereas a venture firm in your sereies A is most likely to back you on into hte next round, they commit to being reinvesting in for the lifecucle of your company. So angels won’t be around fr you long term, but they do help a lot at the start.

emily: they made our second funding process very effective very fast. We probably did not so well in first round, but thanks to angels we compensated for it in second round, as nabeel said it evens out in the longterm.

nabeel: its really realy hard to raise money outside of the valley

susan: if you are starting a company, start it here. If you’ve already staretd it, you should move it here

nabeel: i totally disagree. We thought Boston was the best place for our company, so that lost us a lot of possibilities from angel funding. Angels don’t just come in alone, they need fellow investors, so without that ecostystem of other angels it is much harder. It doesnt work in a lot of the USA.

q: what are the critical mistakes that other startups make in their fundraisingn process?

jason:

most companies I met with shouldnt’ have been trygint to take venture moeny. you need to hink about what your dream is, what your goal is. Be sure that it’s large enough, the market is large enoguh, that you can have a really large exit in 4 to 7 years.

A lot of people who needed 5 or so million dollars to build what they were after that really they just wanted lifestyle busines. They wanted to run this company. When you take V money the clock starts ticking – you have to move quickly, build quickly, and you are rushing towards a change of control. There is a really good chance you will end up without the control, with not being the CEO. You’re giving up your compay to the VCs, people who will share your aims your goals, but expect to get rid of it from your personal hands.

emily:

it really changes the level of pressure. Before we took V money I mostly worried about payroll, I thought the big change woudl be no more worry. In reality it wasn’t “oh we’ve made it now” it just displaced the worry.

matt:

I got loads of congrats when we got funding, which was great for 10 mins, but then I thought oh shit now we’ve got the hard part, the real part.

Q: what do you think about europeans? should they come to san francisco?

We only know about the valley.

susan: I think there’s no focus on the EU market, everyone is more than worreid about the USA enough, secondly MAYBE we look at the asian market

nabeel: most of the really successful vw’s didn’t come from the US. Most of these are outside of the US, I’m not sure what causes that, but I’ve seen so many examples that have bootstrapped and grown huge simply because there was no ecosystem so they had to. PLenty of business that did fine without it.

susan: its clear there are successful companies, but it’s 2-3 years down the line for everyone on this panel to even worry about sellling into europe as a market

Q: what pitfalls in business plans and who is looking into interactive entertainment?

susan: me!

matt: business plans probably aren’t read

susan: not true! we read it! Really we’re looking is the market big, is it worth it, is the team right, are you lyaing out a plan that gets you to your milestones, what are your milestones. Raising money gets you to certain milestones, so your plan answers WHY are you doing that, what will you do next when you get there?

We do look at the expectaions, should we question the sanity of the plan, we use it to do a first-pass.

jason: it should be a powerpoint, with a spreadsheet at the end, NOT a word document

nabeel: it should mostly be just an XLspreadsheet that explains the planned numbers, and then maybe a 10-15 powerpoint to summarise it

susan: if you do not think you can come up with a model that gets you from 10 million Vmoeny to 100 million dollars a year revenue, then don’t take VC money.

Q: taing from friends and family, around 100-150k dollars, what about next steps there?

emily: it’s good if it’s OK to then that they lose everything. They have to know they might lose it all, and will your relationship with them be damaged by that?

nabeel: if it keeps the doors open, its’ good. Anything to get the job done. I’ve never seen a VC have a problem with any of that. Emily’s talking about being honest with your investors and friends you don’t want to deceive them. Anything you can do, mortgage your car, absolutely go for it. It shows self belief.

susan: sometimes we look at are there too many people involved. If you have 30 angels, that’s 30 investors who can make life much harder, we encourage people to consolidate to fewer investors.

susan: too much convertible debt is a probelm. Up to 1 million is about the limit.

jason: absolutely. If someone came to me with 3 million convertible debt then I’m going to be questioning it, but 100k is no problem at all.

Q: how to balance time spent working on your product versus time spent raising capital? 3-4 months raising V money could be half of an entire project you’ve lost. and the whole landscape could change in the time you’re trying to raise that quality. Also should you setup stuffjust for one project, and the next series for the overall company itself?

matt:

we just dropped teh ball entirely during the fund-raising process. You have to create scarcity, so you have ot hit hte market as fast and hard as possible. Absolutely as quickly as possible.

emily:

also gets back to the scale of your project. Whether the potential marktet justifies the amount of money your’e after – if your poroject is too small so that getting funding damages it, you’re looking for too small a thing for it to be worth going for VC omney.

jason:

I think it’s good to be able to demonstrate compelling content, and that will make raising your v round a heck of a lot easier, if you can do it.

Q: difference between east and west coast VC’s?
Q: how do you deal with project-based funding, anc conversion from LLC to C-corp?

susan:

generally proejcts are not a good way to get money. VCs are not setup to take on title-based risk, we look fro companies who will take on that risk, decrease content risk across a seris of different channels.

nabeel:

product-based financing: this is a perennial topic amongst videogaming companies. How do we possibly fund that way? This is not hte right group to talk to, except that to say they are completey different.

Pretty much entirely avoid the east coast. There’s a couple of execeptions, but ont he whoel. West coast vcs is a little bit more about romance, east is a little bit more aobut numbers and facts. For any competitive deal on west coast if you spend 4 months going over nubmers, you’ve already lost the deal (as a VC), so you have to shoot from the hip and go much faster. OVer east coast, peopel pore over nubmers a lot more because of reduced competition.

Speaker: Lesley Matthieson, High Impact

I didn’t find this talk at all useful, not because it was badly given (it wasn’t) but because the speaker seemed to be coming from such a rarefied environment that the ideas and suggestions would only work for a narrow set of people/projects that didn’t include me.

Also, I was hoping for a talk about good things to do in your production process, maybe even get a clear, concise plan – perhaps compare and contrast different production processes.

What we got was a talk vaguely documenting what a small studio does, and glossing over the problems that their practices would cause, rarely giving any more concrete justification for their approach than “it works for us”. The speaker was fluent and entertaining, but the content was unstructured, jumped around a lot, and didn’t cover anything I would call actual production process (everything they do is just a variation on “let programmers do all the design work” and “talk to people instead of having formal process”).

Sounds to me like High Impact is a nice studio to work at, a very sociable and friendly place, and the perfect place for programmers who are frustrated game-designers ;), as they get to do a lot of the work that is normally done by game designers in other companies. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, but it isn’t what I was expecting to learn from the title and topic description.

My own commentary in [ square brackets ], any mistakes/misunderstandings my own fault :).

Introduction

Your production process absolutely affects your design process and in fact every head of department needs to be involved in making sure its good.

Ratchet and Clank (PSP)

Started with no technology, tools, code, ec. Only some art assets: models, aniumations, sounds. No build tools, no pipeline stuff. Timeline from start to gold master was approx 18 months.

1 project manager / 3 x design / 16 x art / 15 x code / 1 x tester / 1 x office-manager

Asked all incoming gameplay programmers to draw a gopher. This tested the flexibility of the person – would they outright refuse, or have a go even if terrible? We aim to hire lead designers who are planners. Ideal designer has a perfect balance of left and right brain.

Boyd-cycles

the dominance of flexibility, the ability to change and adapt to any given incoming (changing) situation. Observe > orient > decide > act > … Observe.

Game-version: Observe > Analyze > Decide > Implement

Better tools lead to more iteration, and hence better game. Ultimately, the speed of the tools fundamentally caps the effective productivity rate of all your talent.

Focussed on making sure no-one can end up delaying other people from doing work

From military research: anyone who has some extra knowledge of the overarching plan, the higher-level planning of the rank or two ranks above them, tends to make better decisions at their own level, because they know the context.

Gameplay tests help hugely with scheduling: they provide an intermediary deadline that demands much more honest, accurately-close-to-gold, code/art/design. Also, knowing that people are going to see what they’ve done makes people work harder.

[Adam: I suspect this partiularly makes people start to mentally integrate their own work into the bigger picture, so for poor teams who struggle and omit things that are blatantly necessary as part of the overall picture get a major helping hand with thinking in a holistic way, at least temporarily]

QA and testers shouldn’t be your primary playtesters day to day, it should be the designers. So, take work away from your designers so they have time for this.

e.g. Level designers design initially a printed paper top-down map for each level. Then artists do the actual construction. What the designers are NOT doing is hacking away on their own PC trying to make stuff work while waiting for programmers to improve the tools for them.

Designers should be “Level Producers”.

[Adam: this is old-school game-design: the visionaries making cool designs out of their own heads, complete things. This doesn't work when you need narrow-focus individuals doing individual parts, especially doesn't work when you need to scale-up the quantity of work being produced (more levels, greater detail in assets, deeper gameplay, etc). Maybe I'm poisoned by MMO development where the magnitude of what needs to be produced is so great, but it seems to me that High Impact gets away with an awful lot of the things in this talk only because of the small scale of the games they do]

Q: how do you balance things when designers don’t understand how difficult things are to implement?

We just get them to talk to the programmers whenever they have an idea. The programmers also understand that they’re only trying to implement the spirit of what the designer wants.

[Adam: nice idea, and something you should always be trying to do - but as an actual solution to the probable problems, it sucks. Hope is not a strategy.]

Q: Do you have a procedure for accountability for getting work done?

It’s self-obvious who’s responsible for a thing because there’s few enough people working on it that everyone knows who did what.

Every level you work on, you know you’re responsible for making it work well.

Q: PM’s need to ensure balance between art, tech, and design. Did you have problems with bias of the PM’s because your PM is reporting into the design team?

I don’t think PM’s should always report to design, that’s just a feature of our studio, I just think that it’s usually a good way of doing it.

[Adam: this sounds reminiscent of the early days of EA where they claimed aspirationally to blur PM with lead designer?]

The PM at our company doesn’t make any decisions, he’s just a facilitator [i.e. basically an AP]

Q: Did you have stages of development: pre-production, production, final, etc?

Yes. Pre-prod was a first-playable level. Length of pre-prod has varied a lot between projects.

No end-phase though. We go to “Focus-ready” (ready for focus testing). We have some pad-time between that and alpha/beta/gold which is mostly fixing bugs or implementing things involved with gameplay.

Q: how do you handle dropping features as a necessity on the schedule in this creativity-driven project-management?

Well, we’ve never yet had to drop features. We’d probably just sit down and talk about it, and see if we could find shortcuts, negotiate to reduce the volume of work, etc.

[Adam: That strikes me as an extremely revealing answer, both positively and negatively]

Q: what’s the relationship between written and oral communication in your company?

Most of the time people are encouraged to just walk over and talk to each other.

Q: how do you decide what’s implemented by programmer vs. designer?

For the majority, we just assume that a level is being done almost entirely by the programmer. Designers will do tiny easy things sometimes if it’s sure they won’t be going beyond the small complexity stuff they can handle.

Q: who’s hooking up triggers in levels etc?

Pretty much everything that’s happening in a level is done by the programmers.

They work both in code and in level editors, and 3D art packages (maya) etc.

[Adam: Power to the programmers!]

Q: what’s the ratio of number of gameplay programmers to designers?

[didn't really get the answer to this]

Speaker: Shannon Posniewski, Cryptic

I was expecting something shockingly naive and/or stupid from the title of the session. The first thing the speaker said was that the title was completely wrong, so I ran with that. With that out of the way, the talk was fine, although small things kept coming out during the talk that were hard to believe or worrying claims.

So it was going OK, until … right at the end, just before the Q&A, and partly during the Q&A, the speaker dropped some serious shockers:

– they’ve never actually used this custom DB: everything that the speaker says RDBMS’s can’t do he doesn’t yet know for sure that his proprietary DB server can do either
– they never bothered to try alternative SQL servers, they just used MS SQL Server
– they’d never heard of Versant until after they’d developed this proprietary DB – apparently they never did any evaulating of other possible DB engines
– they’ve created their own proprietary query language based on C and C syntax, and don’t find any value in using SQL

Disclaimer: I recently started to work for the company that published CoH/CoV, and apparently forced the speaker into using SQL and an RDBMS in the first place. I didn’t join the company until a long time after this had all happened, and I work in a different division in a different continent, so everything in this talk was new to me (although I admit I’d be fascinated to hear what NCsoft’s thoughts were on these development directions)

My own commentary in [ square brackets ], any mistakes/misunderstandings my own fault :).

Title

The title is deliberately wrong and provocative – it’s really that current vendor solutions are inappropriate for the needs of MMOs

Databases 101

[Adam: spent 15 mins explaining basics of modern database usage:

ACID explanation

Relational explanation

SQL explanation

Keys explanation]

SQL DBMSs are safe, tested, used by practically everyone, lots of experience of using them exists.

Why not use it [SQL + RDBMS]?

SQL is optimized for the general case, and is generally “OK” – it will never be terrible. It will always work..

Sometimes queries take a long time to setup – creating an index automatically, etc.

It self-optimizes on the fly with caching etc, but that introduces stalls at unpredictable times. Unpredictable latency caused by this is very bad because sometimes you e.g. try to pick up something in the game world from within the game client, and nothing happens, so user is confused – because of that latency.

[Adam: if this strikes you as very strange behaviour for an RDBMS, you are not alone. It might help to know that the end of the talk, the speaker revealed that they'd only ever used Microsoft SQL Server and hadn't bothered trying out any alternative RDBMS's, and didn't really know much about the others]

Inserts are extremely slow – just for each single row that you insert. Because of all the overhead of checking for consistency etc, inserts are slow.

Once you’ve got data into the database, the per-row overhead to update anything in the row is also fairly expensive (although you can do several changes per row at once for almost no extra penalty).

Object-Relational Impedance Mismatch

Trying to map OO systems into Relational databases is painful and shoehorning it comes with lots of performance loss.

Every class I’ve ever seen in database architecture talks about normalizing all your data. Doing it that way – the “right way” – can really backfire on you.

[Adam: ... apart from all the other classes in DBA, the ones that also talk about DE-normalizing data. I went to different database classes than the speaker, apparently :) ]

On COH we had this idea that we’d store statistics on each individual player – how many times did they pick stuff up, how many times did they kill people, how long they spent online, the number of times they trash-talked in chat, etc.

[Adam: i.e. gameplay metrics, a la the work done by Bungie with Halo heatmaps, or by various 3rd party companies at the moment in the games industry. Cool stuff]

We made a table where there was one row-insert per player PER piece of data that had changed. Some of those stats change all the time, like “how long have they been online”.

So the traffic to the database was extremely high, because each thing had to be updated constantly.

[Adam: Well ... IME this isn't the *normal* way of dealing with that use-case, so I'm not surprised it bombed. If they'd approached it in a more standard way, using simple multi-server database organization, I suspect it might have worked out fine from the start]

So … we threw out all the tranditional DB concepts, and made one column per stat, with no actual names for columns, instead just have “Stat 1 value”, “stat 2 value”, etc.

[Adam: I really don't get how this ever even seemed like a sensible idea, but there was a long queue of people asking questions at the end so I didn't manage to ask before I had to go to next session]

In the interests of performance, we were twisting our data, either in code, or in the DB, or in both places. This became a huge impedance to our development process.

Solution: Caching

Problems:
– unexpected unpredictable 1-second and multi-second latencies

[Adam: I'm really suspcipious about this problme - where is it coming from?]

Solution:
– created a server process that all DB calls from other server processes were indirected through
– it had a second thread that was busy writing stuff out to the DB
– appeared that all writes were instantaneous, but they were being buffered.
– i.e. write-through cache
– all changes you made in game-server memory would show instantly as having been committed

Problems2:
– throughput was still far too slow, although at least now there was no latency

Solution:
– instead of updating every stat every time it changes, we did “snapshots” and only occasionally save them
– …but means that there was no ACID properties being used any more except for Durability

Since that was shot anyway, we went whole-hog, basically. What we decided was we’d keep all the data for the players on a given map on that game server. The database was being used just as a storage engine instead of as a transaction engine. The business logic is now all inside the game-server, and we just periodically flush it all out to the DB.

Problems3:
– lost data
– server-server comms

Solution:
– flush data faster

Conclusion: we optimized the servers, the database engine, to the point that we lost all the benefits of RDBMSs. All the ACID stuff etc had just become a hindrance to us.

Final solution: Cryptic DB

Requirements
– regain ACID benefits
– low predictable latency
– high read/write throughput
– minimize code-db impedance (the schemas changed very often, and that was very painful)
– backup and restore easily

[Adam: suggests that hiring a professional DBA, and using a commercial OODB, would be the best option to start with]

Relaxations
– offline character access is unimportant
– domain integrity became the responsibility of the programmer
– general ad-hoc queries can be slow (we don’t use them)
– SQL not needed

Background – some stuff they’d already done

In CoX we took all static data (mission data, character class template etc) and didn’t put it into a DB. We stored it on disk and loaded it into memory manually.

To help us do this, we created a “StructParser” [just a serialization tool]. This was what we used to start building Cryptic DB. We wrote a pre-parser that looked at our C structs in the source code and wrote out parserss/serializers for it.

Using this for live data as well as static gave us benefits of not having two different storage systems in parallel.

[Adam: in general, that's a pretty good thing to achieve]

Allowed us to create generic mutators, because we know the datatypes and memory layout. So, now we have a generic mutator database. Only simple operations at this point, like mathematical addition of a single counter.

Complicated things like checking whether to allow a trade (lots of rules and things to check) need business logic. We decided to sepaaret the data and logic away from the database, and put it into our game server.

A particular game server owns the data for an entity. E.g. a team server would know about teams, and anything that has to do with teams will be held on that server. It knows how to modify those entities.

[architecture diagram]

Most transactional actions are now being done locally only, so execute extremely fast.

To make it easier to develop, we created auto-transactions. These instrument and change the code so that transactions are written in C. We did field-level locking on the items we were modifying.

[C code with a bunch of special macros implementing a basic transaction, but mostly written in C]

[Adam: here he gave a simple example of distributed transaction processing (although he didn't call it that), enough to convey the general idea, although he ommitted the details that make DTP hard / interesting technically]

Cryptic DB uses basic journal-based techniques for data consistency longterm.

Conclusion

We’ve tried stored procedures etc, doesn’t work. Other MMO devs have had to resort to using solid-state disks etc to make it work fast enough. So, don’t just believe what they say in database classes.

[Adam: the mention of SSD is disingenuous: only one MMO company has decided to try that, and their from Iceland so they're a bit odd anyway (/me ducks and runs for cover) - but seriously for them it's part of an overall game-design and/or technology strategy - they aimed for and achieved gameplay that Cryptic hasn't (single-server world)]

Q: Did you look at federated data as a solution?

We looked a little, didn’t try to implement it, because we’d worked out a proprietary solution already that we reckoned would work.

Latency would still be a problem anyway with it.

Q: How do you handle corruption of data in your DTP?

There’s certain things we relax – we don’t worry about cosmic rays flipping bits randomly.

Within the database, everything is checksummed.

Q: what’s the throughput of your cross-server transactions? How many of your servers are local versus distributed?

I would say at a guess we have a very small number of distributed TP’s. We have a zoned games, so almost everything is local, probably less than 5%.

I have no idea how much slower cross-server transactions are. I don’t think they’re particuarly slower, the biggest problem is just the overhead of having to wait for the locking of data. Probably a couple of times slower, but not an order of magnitude.

Q: you’re saying that with your proprietary “Cryptic DB” you keep all data in memory. What do you do when you hit the limit of RAM in a machine?

It’s a pretty straightforward task to virtualize your memory. If you’re WoW you’ve got no chance of fitting it all into memory, so you only keep in memory the working set of characters that are online right now.

If you still run out, then we make a second shard. We’re talking tens and hundreds of thousands of simultaneous players before we get to that problem.

Q: Do you cluster machines to make the DB?

It’s one giant machine with a lot of memory in it

[Adam: which would suggest you could benefit from SSD, maybe... :P]

Q: Have you considered co-locating the data cache with the servers themselves?

No. We haven’t needed to consider it yet.

You can compress the data in memory and other tricks, so it’s not a problem yet.

Q: how do you do backups?

A set of three servers work together to make sure they can handle the load and so that they can ensure they are being back up correctly.

These are effectively zipped flat files, for simplicity. There’s one server frontend to rest of games, responding to read requests and making in-memory changes for transactions that come through. The second server is slaved to it, and every once in a while writes out an image of it’s DB in a safe way. The last server picks up the things that have been changed and merges them into the master DB. Master DB is then copied back to first and second servers.

At any one spot in the change the data is consistent within that one machine. There may be a huge journal at some point, but it will be consistent.

It turns out that MMO players care more about not being able to play than about losing ten minutes of game data. By about an order of magnitude.

When someone claims they lost a Sword of Death, don’t worry too much, just give them a new sword, because you save a lot of pain and money in customer support costs.

Q: Sounds like you’ve made an OODB, how does that compare with Objectivity or Versant? And the disadvantage of an OODB seems to be the loss of querying ability, so you can’t research behaviour or do metrics to examine your gameplay etc – how do you sovle that?

When we started working on this we didn’t know that Versant existed. We only found out when we first spoke about it publically.

Other ones we knew about but we already had what we wanted from a previous game that was fully tested by us and used in produciton. We were going to have to worry about learning the vendor specifics, and converting our data and pipeline stuff.

I’m also not convinced that an OODB would have worked for the stuff we’re trying to do. We’re writing a lot of code, and the fact you can write AUTO_TRANSACT at the top of a function, and knowing it will Just Work is worht it’s weight in gold.

Re: adhoc queries, we have created a proprietary query language that looks a lot more like C than it does like SQL.

If for some reason we lack a feature we need in our DB, it’s so easy for the DB to interact with C code that you could just write the damn thing in C and have the DB execute that.

Q: Is this in production?

No

Q: How do you test it?

We eat our own dogfood. The true test will be the next time we have a game that goes live.

We have a zillion stress tests, and run that stuff routinely, of course. Right now we just have test-harnesses that fake it.

Q: Could you have made Cryptic DB from the start, or did you only learn it by using SQL from the start? Did you get anyt benefit from SQL?

We got nothing from SQL, it was forced upon us by our publisher who forced us to use SQL. NCsoft were doing network operations and backups etc, so they said look we already know how to use it, and go ahead with it.

I have no idea if we’d have used it given free chance.

We learnt from it that variant latency is a killer, and learnt where the major bottlenecks were in MMO data writing, so we did learn a lot by working with SQL that was transferable knowledge.

Q: How do you handle verisoning on the data, like schema changes?

The actual DB if it sees a field that it doesn’t know, it just ignores it silently. If we add a field that isn’t there, it silently creates it.

We set things to zero or null to create them.

Q: Do you have a central contorl of the DB design, the schema?

Every programmer can add whatever fields they want. We haven’t run into any problems with it yet.

There’s a certain data structure which is the character definition. At the start of the project someone sat down and designed that, and that doesn’t change often. What does change is the occasional adding of a new data field every now and then [i.e. no additional tables being added]

Q: How much did it cost in money and hours to build?

Whole system from start to finish was two people for maybe a year.

Q: Did you try multiple implementations of your SQL server? Different vendors?

No, we did not. There was no indication to us why different ones would ever be faster, so it didn’t seem worth investigating it. I think it is problems endemic to all databases in general.

unless, maybe, you just spent huge amounts of time and effort on database administration. We don’t know how many players we will have, so we can’t actually define optimal schemas and things in advance.

One of our main goals was to spend more time on game coding and less on database coding.

Q: did you spend a lot of time profiling your SQL server?

I think we tried profiling everything, automatically created indexes, stored procedures, etc. We got maybe 15%, 20% improvement, and DBA’s think that’s great, but we were looking for multiple hundreds of percent improvement in performance.

Q: Does your new DB store quests?

It stores state for how you’re progressing through, but not yet the actual quest template data.

Q: Have you looked at any vertical file DB systems?

No.

It’s entirely possible that it’s much faster than using Relational. We were already used to using SQL so we kept in that direction.

Q: will you be releasing this as a third-party DB?

Maybe – but not at least until we’ve put it into production for ourselves!

Speaker: Michael Smith, MindCandy

Another half-hour-long introductory topic talk from the Worlds In Motion summit. Short but sweet. A nice overview of lots of different things going on in the use (and sales) of real-world goods as part of online games / virtual worlds. Misses out plenty of things, but does a good job of giving a taster of the sheer variety that’s going on right now.

Like Adrian’s talk from yesterday, I would have loved a second follow-on talk – now that everyone’s been brought up to speed – that explored where we could be going with these, and looking at how these have been used in more depth / detail.

My own commentary in [ square brackets ], any mistakes/misunderstandings my own fault :).

Overview

This is the first time we’ve spoke about it outside the UK. I hope some of my quirky, eccentric, leftfield thinking might spark off some new thoughts amongst the game designers here.

We could talk about anything from economics to worlds you take anywhere on your mobile phone. But I’ve got limited time, so I’m going to focus on what you can do with physical toys and merchandising.

Every major toy company either has an on/offline toy product at the moment or is currently developing one. Currently a $22billion industry, led by Webkinz. I believe there’s still a huge amount of opportunity in this space – there’s still a long way to go before WK catches up with beaniebabies, who people said were too late to the space, but are still way ahead in terms of overall sales, and have now started doing it too with beaniebabies20.com

Whistlestop tour of new stuff coming out now…

But why should we care from the game design perspective.

1. It’s a major new revenue stream, a new opportunity.

2. More importantly, it allows consumers to connect with our virtual worlds wherever they may be, and makes our worlds more fun.

Mindcandy

It’s a games company I setup focussed on creating social games. First product was PerplexCity [no longer running], played by thousands of players around the world, using lots of different media, e.g. emails, websites, distributing data by phone.

We buzzed players with helicopters, put stuff in newspapers, lots of offline stuff.

The players were trying to locate a real $200,000 treasure we buried somewhere.

Second major product is MoshiMonsters (MM). Imagine tamagotchi mixed with Facebook, with a bit of braintraining mixed in. Aimed at kids, early testing suggests we’ll have a big audience outside our target of 7-12 year olds – teenage girls especially.

Timing – Why do MM now?

– Flash technologies have advanced
– Broadband penetration has increased

Wanted to create a life-like pet in the browser, with great animations. We also wanted to build a very deep behavioural engine: how often you visit, whether you take it shopping, how much you play with it, etc.

Second important point was desire to create a lot of social tools. What you do with your pet you can show off to other players…

– We made a pinboard which lets you post notes, like the Wall in Facebook.
– We think the product is very well suited to being widgetized, we expect our older users to do stuff with Bebo, Facebook, etc.

Final element that is right at the heart of what we do at MindCandy is education.

– Build a product where kids are learning in a stealth way, they don’t realise they are doing homework.
– Vocabulary-boosting by the pet telling you their word of the day, or monsters talking about their current moods (emotional learning) etc.
– General IQ boosting by having a daily “puzzle-challenge”, 60 seconds of challenges that earn you in-game currency

[Adam: there's currently no other way to get in-game currency, and there's no trading facility at the moment]

Status

We’re in beta at the moment, going live in about two months. Business model is very similar to Club Penguin: tiered subscription where you unlock premium content when you buy a Moshi Passport. Many of the products we’re releasing in the real world, such as offline puzzle books, will have unique codes that get you stuff in-game.

The first product is the Mopod, which you attach to your phone. It’s quite sensitive – will go off when walking down the street next to other people, so people attach to their bags even though they don’t have a cellphone.

[Adam: brief dewscription of Michael's background where he explained Firebox.com - "like Sharper Image but cooler and hipper" :)]

Webkinz

They retire certain models over time, creating a strong secondary market, like with Beanie Babies (BB). Recently added new merchandising – can now get figurines you buy, that then also appear in the gameworld.

Other clones:
– shiningstars.com, MyePets.com, mushabelly.com, buildabearville.com

Doll-specific clones:
– barbiegirls.com, be-bratz.com

BG taken early lead because you don’t need the USB key on you at all times in order to play, unlike BeBratz.

Card-games with scratchoffs to reveal unique codes that unlock stuff online:
– WoW
– Bella Sara
– chaoticgame.com
– Maple Story (NB: WotC webserver seems to be AWOL at the moment reporting webapp config error, but I *think* that’s the right URL…)

Other merchandising:
– moo.com – business cards
– stardoll.com – design your own clothes from your doll and buy them for you to wear in real world
– figureprints.com – get a physical model of your personal WoW avatar
– perplexcity.com – awarded small badges (Leitmarks) [Adam: sadly no longer available, perplexcity isn't running any more]
– testtubealiens.com – fill tube with water + special liquid, then hold up to screen, and the alien has a sensor that changes status based on what’s on the screen
– ubfunkeys.com – like the Keys you get in kidrobot, but random what’s in the box, USB dongle to unlock
– tamatown.com – (Tamagotchi) newer models have infrared to allow you to meet other people on the street
– me2 (from irwintoy.com) – motion sensor which you attach to yourself like a pedometer, records your physical activity, then USB dongle gives points to your virtual avatar based on how much you walked that day
– ibuddy.info – detects which emoticons you receive over IM and glows different colours based on them
– ambientdevices.com – e.g. umbrella that changes handle colour based on weather predictions downloaded from net
– edoclaundry.com – unique codes, websites, etc hidden in the fabric [also the labels etc]

t-shirts
– t-qualizer.biz, wi-fi detector t-shirts, proximity detectors that you buy as a pair and when next to each other the t-shirt design changes

…end of the whistlestop tour of what’s going on that’s interesting and unusual.

Summary

New revenue streams
Increased PR opportunities
New avenues for viral growth due to physical visibility to people on street
Increased user engagement because of ongoing conversation with the product

Mostly I’m covering online-related and social-networking related topics, but jumping around between GDC Mobile, Serious Games, Worlds In Motion summit, Independent Games, and the Game Design, Production, and Business tracks.

Speaker: Jeffrey Steefel, Turbine

IMHO, Jeffrey hereby strengthens the weight of evidence that Turbine is genuinely turning the corner from making poorly-guided foolish games to doing cutting-edge stuff and doing it well. Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO) has gone some considerable way to burying the failings of Asheron’s Call 2 (AC2) and Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO), but it’s still far from certain that it’s a sustainable direction for them. In that context, Jeffrey speaks very convincingly and with a lot of apparent understanding about what they’ve done well and where they’re going with it in the future. Frankly, all of the incumbent MMO companies need to be doing this, and pushing at least this far and fast ahead, so it’s great to see someone senior at Turbine pushing this so strongly.

There’s a glaring omission – why does he have nothing to say beyond google-maps: are they going to sit on their laurels on this? It was quite some time ago that they added this, but then there don’t seem to have been any other major integration / openness initiatives on the LotRO project (and integrating a wiki is nothing special or worth making noise about, that’s just as plain obvious as including an auction house and an LFG tool IMHO). But on the whole an interesting and refreshing talk, and especially a quality of talk that I’d like to see more of at GDC.

My own commentary in [ square brackets ], any mistakes/misunderstandings my own fault :).

Open worlds are intimidating

Coming into a new empty environment is overwhelming for many people, so that structure of some kind is very important for any open-world environment. Doesn’t have to be a game, but they make a good example.

If you add a sense of space this gives some focus and constraint to your creativity. It provides touchpoints for ideas and imagination. No longer imagining in a vacuum.

Next is a sense of purpose. Community is the most important aspect, but you still need a purpose for being here. It can vary, it can change from moment to moment, but it has to be present in some form.

Finally, there is community. Both expression of yourself, and your identity in the community. I want to express my identity in order to show my own personal response to the world / space we’re in.

To me the biggest intersection between VW and games is the way that games limit choices, have rules, provide constraints that give purpose and a sense of place to the world.

Kinds of online space

Social networks are virtual worlds. People come together, and they have purposes (Find a job, make friends, meet people, waste time, etc).

Standard VWs to me are many things: 3D environment like SecondLife (SL), but also 2D like Habbo Hotel, or IMVU which is a linked together set of worlds.

Finally, there are the MMO’s, “the beast” of virtual worlds.

We’re all trying to create online, social, entertainment. Its very easy to get distracted by the word “entertainment”, but you have to look at it in the broadest sense.

Each has advantages, e.g.:
– online games: immersive, highly directed experiences. Not as directed as a film, which tells you precisely what to look at at all times, but still it’s fundamentally an on-rails experience. We’ve pretty much created the experience for you.

– Virtual Worlds (VW): you have a wider world, without some of the constraint problems and the design challenges. But these open worlds don’t have any overarching unified themes; although they may have sub-areas that have local themes, there’s no wider sense of place, so people get lost within it.

– Social Networks (SN): their advantage is being accessible to anyone anhwere anywhen in the world, they’re really good at user interface stuff and being easy to get to and quick to use.

Overall aims and directions

Common to all: Social persistence + identity + creative expression

Divergence points:
– sn: accessible, ease of use, runs anywhere, platform agnostic
– vw: freedom, creative, ugc
– game: strucutre (gameplay), sense of place, sense of purpose

[next: image showing three concentric rings - "access" surrounding "inspiration" surrounding "experience"]

Access is the biggest problem right now. In the MMO space in general that’s something that’s only recently come to people’s front of mind. MMO’s now trying to work out how to get people into the experience as rapidly as possible.

But then, you also need to have something that provides the inspiration – sense of place, sense of purpose, and MUST BE PERSISTENTly there. Can change over time, but I need to know why it’s changed, it has to have a history that is consistent.

[Adam: I'm really not sure about that, the idea that the persistence of the sense of place/purpose is essential. I think that pretty much flies in the face of the idea of casual MMOs - and in fact I'd argue that many successful facebook games have practically no persistence: the rules change, the gameplay changes, the context changes ... yet this doesn't seem to be a major problem. In those cases it's mostly not a good thing, but it doesnt' seem to be a ruinous thing, and I think you could go a very long way with creating a game world which was NOT persistent with purpose.

In fact, I'd say that Alternate Reality Games are more non-persistent in this respect than they are persistent, and that that is one of their greatest strengths, and one of the ways they attract a much wider audience and achieve many of the accessibility points that Jeff talks about as being primary concerns right now. Every time you log in to an ARG, the whole world has changed, and the challenge and the aims and purpose have changed too, because other people have advanced the plot - the world is a truly "living" world, that changes even when you're not there to change it yourself. This is a good thing!]

What we’re doing is fundamentally trying to create a balance between FREEDOM and STRUCTURE. We walk along the knife-edge between them all the time. How do we create that balance for multiple different people – the balance point is different for each of them.

So what are we doing at Turbine?

Focussing on the strengths of the MMO to create these compelling places.

Something that sparks my creativity, sparks my sense of place/purpose.

Something to unify the world – maybe a global story, maybe the place itself, maybe it’s a single global event that’s happening. You can have different subsets of these in local areas.

Needs to be some set of goals, and preferably provide ways for players to create goals for each other.

Need to reach a much, much broader audience. How can we be on more platforms, how can we get the content to them in ways that are not prohibitive like it is now?

That sounds like a technological situation, but it’s more about focussing on what we’re providing to the end-user.

The mod tools are too complicated, need to be probably simpler even than a VCR – need to make them as easy to use as common electrical appliances.

Where do we focus in concrete terms?

We like to make web-aware worlds: native web features. In a 3d virtual environment, how is that comign together with the web so that social relations can take place across both.

Remove hardware connectivity barriers.

Integrate with a “mobile” lifestyle – being mobile but taking your data access with you is now standard, now a typical part of life. It’s not about porting the 3d to the phone, it’s about finding out how the experience is tied to the mobile aspect of our life, and playing up to that.

There’s a spectrum of value propositions, and we need to cover the whole spectrum, because each user is different, and even the individual has different willingnesses to pay / preferred payment schemes at different times and dates.

Try to turn the game inside out:
– expose the SNs onto the net
– share rich data and realtime-data tools
– integrate your persona online, so that whethere youre in game or out you have a presence everywhere
– adding strong SN tools, such as creative music tools in LotRO

e.g.
– display only: character pages. Nicely implemented, polished, but … really just a readout of my identity in that world
– official content with user-editing: we’re trying to play around with this by integrating google maps into the game, allowing players to use the gmaps tools to create custom paths in the game, and share journeys and itineraries. We’ve taken all these sites (also the tolkein encyclopaedia) and stuck it in a wiki. It has become owned by the players – its their data, their repository.
– trying to move away from wiki, because wiki is still too complicated for most people
– want to make sure that it’s someting that EVERYONE can participate in

[Adam: dwelt on the easy free things they got by integrating with gmaps, but presented it as though this applied to the whole game. It clearly does not, that's totally false - yes, it was a brilliant idea to make Google-Maps-Middle-Earth, but ... the benefits of tagging, user created joruneys, etc are all SPECIFIC to that partner and that particularly technology from that partner, these are not generic wins, and definitely not good examples of what Turbine has been doing - because they didn't do them]
– I can already create a middle-earth mashup, tag stuff, make custom pathing.
– trying to make it so that wherever I am online, my game is a fulltime existence, I can access it and be part of the community even when out of the game client

How can I take this game that has lots of structure, and within that try to give more freedom?
– music that lets you be endlessly creative, play music in real time together with other people. We saw people create music videos together and put them up on the internet. I can hold performances, I Can record them, I can invite people to come and listen to a performance I’m giving in-world

[Adam: where is the EXPORT of these performances? he seems to have missed out on this, directly contradicting much of what he said before, both about accessibility, and about the primary importance of the tools being easy to use, and - most damningly - about the "integration" between web and game]

– likewise, outfit systems that allow for customization of avatar look

Is it a game? Is it a VW? It doesn’t really matter, it’s all the same thing.

The Future

Opportunities to create goals for other people, and to share them.
…+[Adam: at this point he re-iterated most of the things he'd said earlier on in the talk. Good summary, but I'm not going to re-type them all here :)]

Q: We have the advantage of having structure built-in, so how do you add that to a VW?

With LotRo we had a story, giving us free purpose and place, but the problem was that that made it automatically a single-player game, so we had to make it more general, find the underlying unifying themese of the story so that we could make wider, more world-like gameplay.

Q: I’ve seen sites on the net shut down just for having lyrics on them. Are you afraid about those legals, I mean even the IP [twisting] of Crazy Train being played in MiddleEarth

They’re not monetizing it, so I think it’s fine. I think if you try to monetize playing other people’s music, you’re going to get in trouble. We don’t worry about it, we’re conscious of it, we watch it, but just see what happens.

Q: What about the moving of one character from one world to another? People want to be able to take their identity from MySpace to Facebook to etc. How do you see this happening in the games, especially in the MMO?

I think you need to provide dual-citizenship. I get to choose whether I associate that with other game avatars. I need persistency of global account. We’re doing stuff that you can earn in LotRo that is given currency to your account, NOT to your avatar. We could take that to be across games in the future, could become stuff like achievement points?

I think you have to give people a choice between being anonymous and not, and at what point they want to make the distinction.

Q: Do you see publishers collaborating?

Without collaboration, there’s connectivity through the individuals participating and second-stage linking stuff. Some interoperability would be great, but we do live in a world where IM clients dont’ even interoperate, so I think we’ve got a long way to go. The technology and data challenges are much bigger in MMOs.

Q: why can’t we just take standard content-creation tools like Maya and use them for players?

To take an item made in Maya and put it into the game takes a lot of complicated trickery, but we, sony, etc all do that part differently. I agree it’s a great vision to just accept importing of objects saved out of any of those packages, but I think it’s going to be very hard.

[i.e. we all have proprietary art-pipelines, that's how the professional games industry works on a standard basis - every company has different internal processes. Nothing unusual there.]

Q: some companies e.g. funcom are using advertising-funded revenue. Can you give some other examples that would work for fantasy where coca cola and billboards can’t be used?

Advertising isn’t the best model for fantasy games. But it’s a spectrum. Maybe you have people who come into the world and have access to better content-creation tools, and have to pay to participate as content-creators. And it could be a sliding scale of how much you pay in proportion to how much you’re adding to the game [doesn't specify inverse or not]

It’s a value-exchange equation.

I think we’re at a place where the payment technologies are getting more robust, and consumers willingness to participate in more flexible, smaller chunks, is increasing, with purchase of small pieces of music etc.

Q: How do you deal with griefers / PvP / etc?

You need to try to create the environments that people want, but to also protect people who don’t want to be a part of it. We’ve created areas where you can kill anything and everything, and as a player who doesn’t want that, you will be heavily warned when you try to walk in, so you have the ability to walk away / around it.

You have to provide all the possible experiences, but protect them from each other.

Q: The designs coming out of China are based on peer-pressure and a fear of loathing?

I don’t think that’s a world I want to spend time in, personally.

That’s why you need some structure, because in a purely open world we all sooner or later start bumping into each other, treading on each others toes.

The really cool thing would be to find a way to allow people to co-exist without ruining the experience for each other. I haven’t found that solution yet, but working on it.

Speaker: Peter Marx, Analog Protocol/MTV

Good to hear about virtual worlds and MMOs from the perspective of a mega content / media company. Several interesting ideas and explanations that are well worth reading if you haven’t already been tracking the way that Viacom et al have been approaching the online socializing space.

Nothing fundamentally new, but the ideas presented were clear and consistent – and I’m kicking myself for not having tried VLES sooner, it sounds fun.

My own commentary in [ square brackets ], any mistakes/misunderstandings my own fault :).

Avatars are everything

The only way to greatly change the number of active / concurrent users is to make the avatar creation process as simple, as quick, as easy as possible.

Make Me is a very fast, simple way to make an avatar and quickly send it to other people.

Second Life (SL) has a very powerful avatar-creation system, but it simply takes too long. You can (if you want) make something that looks just like you in real life.

VLES is not very realistic, but it’s simple to use and quick. It’s an aspirational model, something you’d feel comfortable with being that image, and this increased the number of people who stayed, the number of people who were active.

So: lesson to people making VWs: spend good money on the avatar-creation tool.

How avatars move, what they do, what they say is very important.

We’ve found that less is a little bit more.

Sliders and checkboxes are NOT fun, don’t use them for avatar-creation.

We have a lot of dancing avatars, a lot that anim-emote. We found people love “moving” their avatars in some sense. At the end of the day, chat and speechbubbles isn’t exciting – we already do so much plain text chat (email, forums, SMS) that plain speech doesn’t interest us much.

Environments

Having big, expansive worlds isn’t that interesting. An iconic representation of a place is far more important – the icon is enough, e.g. the hollywood sign is all you need. you don’t need to recreate any actual part of it; don’t create every sidewalk, every parking meter.

[Adam: you need the abstract representation, the stuff that people remember in their mental model - the tarmac is not part of your mental model of "what is hollywood", even though you're aware it's there]

So: when choosing scale of size of world, always veer towards making it small.

Content

We’re a content company.

If you can somehow become a part of the conversation that people are doing on mobiles, then media companies become part of the equation.

Media companies want to see avatars interacting with content. Branded content especially. Hence things like Laguna Beach, and Pimp My Ride.

They do this because they want lots of the conversation that takes place in the VW to be conversation ABOUT the branded content. If, in addition (not instead), you can do the advertising part as well, that’s a bonus.

It’s an advertisers dream if you can turn the user’s own living room to be an advertising space, by the fact that you’ve managed to get them to continue talking about it.

Media companies fundamentally aim to be “part of every conversation that takes place about every thing”.

e.g. many movies obviously would make good VW’s, without much thought. Some might not be a good medium for advertising, such as Pirates of the Caribbean (PotC), but you can do SOME advertising.

OTOH, in MTV all the VW’s themselves are the advertising. The whole thing is to expose you to the advertising, and get you thinking and talking about it.

Challenges with content:

Relevance. Getting a bottle of Coke into WoW is not easy.

Expensive. Media companies circumvent this by shifting the burden to some other point in the value chain, e.g. to the consumer (i.e. UGC). A ratings system is a form of UGC that continues to push and promote conversation.

[Adam: this makes ratings systems disproportionately important compared to their absolute social value: they preserve the conversational aspect, and grow it. They get hugely underrated by games developers, typically, IMHO]

Economy

All VW’s have a virtual currency. They do this so that the VW owner can pay the users to participate in the world. The more that people get paid, the more they are going to hang around in this world.

One of the AP’s at EA found a UO character for sale on eBay. No-one had anticipated this secondary market back then. Today, that is an instituionalized part of VW design and operation. Every time you play a game in Neopets they give you a couple of bucks.

Challenges with economies:

They get out of balance. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

Work is extremely boring.

[Adam: for some reason, he doesn't mention RMT here; whether you think it's good or bad, it's certainly a "challenge"]

Metagame

This is the key to having long-term retention of your users (at least according to all the game designers I know).

How do you create games that can bring in casual gamers? The 18-24 year olds who are just casually coming along, hanging out for a bit, consuming some advertising, then going away again, perhaps indefinitely, but eventually coming back.

The metagame in the MTV space, something that people feel they are a part of, something that gives them some progression, is really hard.

[Adam: actually, they could achieve a lot here with ARG-style shared global questing IMHO]

[here he talks a bit about a concrete example of a game they've got in beta - I think it was VLES - to illustrate the metagame points, but I didn't really see how the stuff he described satisfied the problems he'd just outlined. Sounds like fun though, I'll have to try it :)]

You can make a game out of choosing a role: artist or fan.

Only a limited number of fans can attend any band performance, where artists instead fight the challenge of getting more attention than other bands.

Currently in early beta.

They have created a series of layered metagames on top of each other, to try and increase long-term retention.

Distribution

User experience is determined by distribution network, and user’s platform (client platform).

You can spend an awful lot of money creating your world, and yet still be limited to the lowest common denominator which is the [last-mile] PC that the user is using.

There are PC’s being sold that have practically no RAM, but are very very cheap – but hence are more likely to be bought by large numbers of people. They then install Vista on it (!) that makes the machine almost incapable of running anything substantial.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing mega MMORPGs or just things aimed at tiny mobile screens: either way you have almost no control over the end device, you can be scuppered at the last minute.

[Adam: i.e. the stereotypical disadvantage of PC development compared to standard console development]

You shouldn’t make software that needs installing: teenagers are often using computers that they don’t have administrator rights for. Even recently at the company, I couldn’t let a high-ranking person try some software because he didn’t have admin rights on his own PC. We’ve found that 60%-70% of people who download the client never log in to the world.

[Adam: this is one of the main things Runescape got right, and I'd hoped it was common knowledge by now, but perhaps not]

Conclusion

Everyone I know wants to make a really powerful, immersive, rich 3D virtual world. That’s the dream of a lot of people.

But even in 2008 the technology is still very much the limiting factor. The reason Facebook UI is so simple is so that it works so well on everything.

But as a content owner, you have to put powerful rich media out. e.g. LoTR doesn’t work at all for simple 2D animations, for flat visual experience.

There are stories that people want to tell that require high-end graphics.

[Adam: this left me wondering whether people who wanted to tell stories using high-end graphics were going down the right path or whether they should be focussing instead on finding ways to tell their stories that didn't need the graphics. In contrast to the game-design talk this morning which demonstrated that good graphics are often a fundamental part of gameplay, my feeling is that "rich" visual media are never a required part]

EDIT: Slides + voiceover on Adrian’s site now – freetoplay.biz

A good introduction to people wanting to start paying attention to what’s been happening in MMO industry for the last 5 years. Didn’t delve into the recent changes in the last 1-2 years, more dwelling on the fact that the last 2 years have seen the cash-cows of the first wave of changes (F2P itself) delivering revenues that were no longer just “bestseller” status for a normal game, but were actually now much bigger even that that.

So, for instance, apart from a brief outline of FoodFight, there was no coverage of the way games have been colonising social networks, or where this seems to be heading next.

My own commentary in [ square brackets ], any mistakes/misunderstandings my own fault :).

Introduction / background

[Adam: I missed some of the start trying to find a seat in the massively over-crowded room]

Fundamentally with F2P, you’re banking on the fact that increased player base size increases options for alternative monetizations.

Top 15 or so MMO’s by number of players include only one pay-to-play MMO (WoW)

91% of the online games that any given kid plays are f2p

Virtual Item sales
– unlimited ARPU
– …

[Adam: ...and so it went on, no new information, but a decent 101 guide to low-end MMO monetization and F2P.

Most of the talk at this point is just re-quoting statistics and information from the well-known players in the various branches of MMO industry (RPG, free RPG, merchandised/branded retail webkinz, information sale/food fight, etc) nothing you wouldn't already know if you had come to the rountables and lectures at GDC, AGDC, etc over last few years. Decent catchup for newcomers.]

Looking Forward

– respect the free players: it’s tempting to overlook the non-paying players, but they are critically important, they make the game feel like a whole world of people

– Support integrated graphics: Nexxon claimed they’d lose 80% of their playerbase if their games required any retail purchased graphics card

– Go browser-based or small download: even WoW is now using a streamed client

[Adam: I feel that's disingenuous: browser-based is at its heart a fundamentally different proposition from instant-play, e.g. because of the way it integrates into the Web 2.0 concept in a very different way; I'm pretty sure what he's trying to say is the latter ONLY, i.e. "keep time-to-start-playing as low as possible"]

– Support regional payment systems:

[Adam: personally, I'd say just go to any of the main casual games conferences, and speak to the european publishers/portals/etc, there's plenty of big companies who've been doing the multi-headed payment system game for a long time now.]

– Provide short compulsion loops: what’s the incremental investment of time needed to levelup or satisfy some gameplay pleasure?

– Defer user sign-up: Sherwood is a good example of minimal user-sign-up

[Adam: I'll write something up about this in more detail soon, as it's an area I've long argued internally, and I feel there's quite a lot to say that Adrian didn't mention at all here]

Challenges

– virtual property
– slow broadband
– rising dev costs, as happened in the casual games industry, now with multi-million dollar production costs
– SL slowdown [Adam: actually, I think this is largely irrelevant - Adrian talks about money and confidence being affected, but IME no serious VC that knows enough of what it's doing that it was going to stick around with this stuff longterm in the first place ever thought that SL's success level was particularly relevant]
– secondary markets
– kids-only games: players stop playing F2P games when they stop being a teenager

Trends

– New platforms (software: Facebook, hardware: iPhone, etc): will be interesting to see how they get used
– Disappearance of walled-garden games: metaplace is a good example of where there are no walls making users play a particular game and stay loyal
[IMHO, this is a very dangerous direction to go in. Sure, a lot of people, especially the incumbents, need to explore it to ensure they don't get left behind, but unlike general information (outside the games industry), where sharing is clearly fundamentally good, games are a different beast altogether, where it is FAR from obvious that games benefit from openness; Personally, I'd say the majority of evidence currently points the other way. So ... openness may happen, but it may also disappear quite quickly too]
– Old NPD top sellers appearing as F2P games, e.g. Jagex/Runescape talking recently about making games from 5 years ago, but doing them as downloadable in a browser now technology has moved on
[This seems a bit of a no-brainer, the publising industry has always been exploring and improving it's capitalization on back-catalogue items, so I think the exploration of this stuff by incumbents now is nothing new]

Q: Does the pareto principle hold true here: 20% of your users provide 80% of your income?

Yes, I think that holds true across the spectrum of games, web, etc.

Q: What comes after free? Once everything’s free, online, everyone’s playing, what next?

The ability to share content between games, to move avatar investment to a different game

Maybe *your* game would be what comes after…

[Adam: The person asking the question was the guy behind PMOG]

Q: What are best practices for user-acquisition in free to play games?

Viral word-of-mouth stuff is really good.

Miniclip.

Q: From a game-design POV what would be the best thing to do to increase percentage of monetized users?

Make it as frictionless as possible to put money into your world.

[plus some fairly obvious ideas off the cuff]

A very broad range of ideas on what should shape game design at a fundamental level. I greatly enjoyed this for the way it jumped to a bunch of related but competing ideals and perspectives.

Also very interesting for including a 20-minute section on How to Design for Alternate Reality Games (not billed as such, but that’s what it was: a theory on how to think when designing ARGs).

Sections

Section 1: Flow, and how to evaluate games
Section 2: Games break down into inputs and outputs
Section 3: Theories of design for Alternate Reality Games

Speakers

[1] Kellee Santiago
[2] John Mak
[3] Pekko Koskinen

My own occasional commentary is in [ square brackets ]

Section 3: Theories of design for Alternate Reality Games

This presentation is a personal design path, because the topic is in daner of leading to too abstract things, so personalising will make it more concrete, and secondly using concrete example will probably help explain.

I was working in university game research lab in finland, then tried to get projects going between old traditional forms of art and games.

One project from last fall was a reality game that will take place in finland next fall (2008???).

Background of game mechanics, but also a choreographer, a few dances, some actors, a video artist, and theatre director. These are all controlled by background game structure.

Basic premise is that everything you see around you is actually fictional. We’re pretending you’re living in a virtual disney land, your life is part of a museum exhibition, you’re a token citizen in this piece.

We insert fictional elements into the streetlife, give roles to players and use this to nudge people out of their normal daily routines.

I had to recalibrate my game design principles, because this needs some big changes to things I’d normally done. We’d made mainly experimental computer games before, and although I had a background in roleplaying this was still pretty new different design requirements.

Games can be designed for any medium, you can make games that are sound-only, text-only. Any medium at all you can come up with a game for. Why is that?

I think that’s peculiar because other forms of expression are rooted in the medium, e.g. painting is defined by it’s being a visual medium, music is an audio onee, yet that games are simply independent and can apply any medium that they choose.

This leads to the question: where do games reside, where do they stem from?

[this is part of their uniqueness: they're part of what we are as humans]

I have a couple of ideas…

1. Games are essentially systesm: structures and operations. The structures, and the operations that are based on those strucutres. The medium’s features are there to make the structures apparent, and make the operations sensible / understandable.

e.g. learnign chess: you can learn it many ways, physically: in your head, on paper. but what’s important is that you’re devleoping a mental-model in your head, and then you can play it in any medium.

This is true of all games, I think: the game is not part of the medium, it just uses a given medium to show the structure that the game is comprised of.

If this is the case … doesn’t that mean that the whole game ultimately resides and plays out within the player’s own mind?

The starting point for any move in the game is in my head; first I play the move in my head, to decide what to do in reality, what action to actually take in the game outside my head.

2. If these reside in the player, aren’t games ultimately “systems of behaviour”?

If I play something, I’m behaving differently from my normal self [because I'm using that custom proprietary mental model to shape my thinking and actions].

Can’t we think of game design as you coming up with a pattern of behaviour “that would be an interesting way to behave, to live, to act” and then turning it into a representation of structures and operations that forces that way to behave.

3. If we adopt this design premise, then can we design a player the same way we design a game?

[on a basic level, you would expect a definite resounding yes: this is mathematical matching at play]

I think we can.

Sturucturally the approach I used was to think that games are environments in which we play. But…we could also design games as lenses, not as environments, but as esomething placed between you and your environment, that shape how you view your environment.

This gave me the approach I needed to do the reality-game design.

I could get someone doing something that looked game-like. Then I could get some other people to walk into the room and tell them that this was an artist doing an art piece.

I could then get more people to come in, and tell them that it was a religious event.

These are three different lenses of the same activity that is occurring.

Looking to the future…

This model of lenses cuts out some thing that games can do much better than just be lenses, so it’s not perfect as a model.

Are games as we see them now the last stop in development of understanding of what a game is, and of examples of genres, or just the beginning of a fundamentally different way of looking at them.

If you look at games pre-computers, they haven’t changed for thousands of years. But it’s changed so much in 20-30 years that this suggests its still a long way away from slowing down, if you look at historical cultural changes.

I think games are the best way to take control of life: we can design our lives, we can design the reality we want, how we live our lives.

People talk about how mmorpg players are losing their personalities to another online personlity. I think this is a reflection of the fact that games have a baheriovurla background, so they ALWAYS tie up with identity they ALWAYS cause you to adopt a new identity in order to play them.

That’s one development that’s only just starting at the moment, and in the long run I think we’ll come to see it as a general thing.

A very broad range of ideas on what should shape game design at a fundamental level. I greatly enjoyed this for the way it jumped to a bunch of related but competing ideals and perspectives.

Also very interesting for including a 20-minute section on How to Design for Alternate Reality Games (not billed as such, but that’s what it was: a theory on how to think when designing ARGs).

Sections

Section 1: Flow, and how to evaluate games
Section 2: Games break down into inputs and outputs
Section 3: Theories of design for Alternate Reality Games

Speakers

[1] Kellee Santiago
[2] John Mak
[3] Pekko Koskinen

My own occasional commentary is in [ square brackets ]

Section 2: Games break down into inputs and outputs

Graphics over gameplay, AND gameplay over graphics don’t actually mean anything

Games break down into inputs and outputs. The game doesn’t exist without outputs, nor without inputs, so it’s meaningless to ask which is “most important”.

[Adam: I think you need to play ProgessQuest more... :P. Although I innately agree with this, or used to for many years, PQ eventually persuaded me that this was more of a personal self-delusion than a truism. Useful, but definitely NOT the full picture.]

You need to recognise that it’s not a game if there’s no ownership of inputs; you see something happen, and feel that’s it because of something you did.

Guitar Hero (GH) sucks because pressing a button when you have to isn’t owning any outputs, only owning an input. But … by giving you rock music when you press the butons, it DOES give you an output to own.

I had a sucky game that I was prototyping, and thought it was just really boring, I’d never pay for it, and then I added some cool graphics, and suddenly …it actually became really enjoyable. So I realised that graphics are actually essential.

I did a simple test where you could just jump high and low (small red ball on white bg).

All I did next was map every interaction to some kind of output.

Jumping made you squish narrowly, and when you move left and right a propeller on top rotates. Landing makes you squash out as you splat. Exponential decay on the animation of propeller.

All the gameplay rules are EXACTLY the same, but somehow it’s suddenly more compelling, and that’s what’s been blowing my mind.

[c.f. freecraft - try the early releases where no-one had created copyright-free art yet, so it was all just magenta blobs versus green blobs, and although the ruleset was standard Warcraft 2, the game itself sucked ass]

[c.f. Pixar's very earliest animation work, the mini-story of the angle-poise lamp - look at how much inferred meaning humans can get out of the simplest of graphics, but they need SOME clues as to intent; in the pixar animation, the angle of the lamp, the speed of movement, and the direction of the light beam give you just enough to anthropomorphise it]

[1]

Its interesitng because I’ve seen a lot of designers wrestling with this, they feel the publisher isn’t creative, and doesn’t “get” the vision, and it’s because they’re showing the plain simple boxes and lineart version.

I think I see that there’s a certain amount of graphics that you need to even show your basic vision.

[2]

If you can’t see it, then it isn’t there.

The game developers are sort of projecting the gameplay, the feedback especially into the game that they know is going to be there, but isn’t there yet, because they have a library of this stuff in their head and know what it will be.

[1]

I’m wondering what is the level at which skinning the same mechanics does lead to a different experience, a different game.

What are we innovating on, how much is actually necessary innovation.

[2]

We talk about games as expression, and then go into the technical stuff. But I think a lot of the expression is simply “what you see and what you hear”.

Rez has very simple gameplay, not much expression, but the expression in fact IS how the visuals and audios all come together.

What if Call of Duty 3 (COD3) had Rez graphics? I realised that I would go from thinking it was boring and dull, to thinking that it was all about outputs, and that was when I started.

[3]

Much of the gameplay is seeing the difference between what you expected to happen when you did something, and what actually happened.

If you see exactly what you expected, then it’s dull.

If you see nothing like what you expected, then it’s ??? pointless??? [didnt hear this clearly]

The audio-visual are part of this feedback, they actualise the feedback. That’s the only way we get to see into the [FSM] of the game to see how it’s reacting to our actions, and to what extent.

A very broad range of ideas on what should shape game design at a fundamental level. I greatly enjoyed this for the way it jumped to a bunch of related but competing ideals and perspectives.

Also very interesting for including a 20-minute section on How to Design for Alternate Reality Games (not billed as such, but that’s what it was: a theory on how to think when designing ARGs).

Sections

Section 1: Flow, and how to evaluate games
Section 2: Games break down into inputs and outputs
Section 3: Theories of design for Alternate Reality Games

Speakers

[1] Kellee Santiago
[2] John Mak
[3] Pekko Koskinen

Section 1: Flow, and how to evaluate games

How do we measure games?

Katamari Damacy (KD) valued as “a few hours of short, sweet entertainment”, but also “something you go back to again and again”. How does that makes sense?

I spent more time playing KD than God of War (GoW), but the latter was $60 as opposed to $20.

Is time the way we should be measuring the value of a game?

Flow

Tried to design Flow as something you COULD play over and over again, but would potentially play very differently every time. Many players didn’t notice this because of the strong simple central gameplay.

[2]

Play value may be more important in terms of “how much longer afterwards you continue to remember / think about it”, like books and films that make you go away and think afterwards, long after you’re no longer experiencing the entertainment.

[3]

How you’ve been changed by reading a book is a way of measuring its value/effect, but this is something we don’t do with games.

This is sad, as games have much more potential to affect players.

Maybe its necessary to talk about the number of horus of gameplay, and the replayability, to market and sell game, but I don’t think it has any value for the design of games.

[2]

You play a game differently by knowing what’s going to happen next, so replayability actually is very important, potentially. e.g. why are you able to study and re-study a great book over and over again, how do you not get bored / seen it all after the first few times?

[1]

KD made me think how even we in the industry don’t place enough value on the “meaningful content” – the fact that we only set a price of $20 suggests we’re not thinking it ourselves.

[3]

If we approach the player as “was he entertained? Was he feeling good afterwards, was he taking anything in?”, with design I think we have to look sometimes at the ACTUAL effects that took place – what skills did the player experience, what did they learn while playing?

[2]

I don’t think about the player too much when I design games, but that’s because I guess I just design for myself, mostly.

[3]

It’s an interesting thought that you can make world design part of the game design. Designing the game-world so that the rewards are integrated into it. World could be small-enviroment, I mean it abstractly.

[2]

It’s just another tool, non-intrinsic rewards. It gives some extra meaning to the game. e.g. Geometery Wars (GW) uses points to show that it’s about perfecting a certain skill.

[1]

Extrinsic rewards either tap into Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, or into competitiveness.

If that’s what you WANT to tap into, go for extrinsics, otherwise you have to think more about what exactly the rewards are encourgaging in the player.

[3]

We don’t actually think how many rewardlike elements there in the game. For instance, in GW the size of explosopns., the graphic effects, are rewards in themselves. The glorious mega explosions are a special reward too.