Summary

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

(I have more to add here later, but I’ve got to run to a meeting; will update the post when I have time)

All errors / omissions my fault, as ever, and my comments in [square brackets].

Not-a-post-mortem

This is not a post-mortem, it’s mid-mortem – we’re still actively doing the changes I’m talking about here.

126 million registered accounts, 11.5 m monthly logins. Seen 40% growth in last year of signups. 2008 was a good year for us. Financials arent’e public yet, so I cant say, but there’s probably good news coming up.

We’re trying to add more game to Habbo.

What’s Habbo? A Social MMO.

[description of Habbo]. We did web based first, it’s nice to see the industry validating our decision from 2001 and also moving to web-based.
[showed screenshots of Hogwarts room where people are RPing HP inside HH]
[showed American Idol RP]; there’s no tools, no logic, no control – it’s all voluntary shared play.

We’re now selling windows, so you can stick them on the walls and get pieces of views out to outside [couple of examples where people made floor to ceiling glass walls by plastering the wall].

[showed McD role-play], with people pretending to be servers, buying food, eating, etc. All emotes. Children are interested to know what it’s really like (real world) to flip burgers, theyr’e too young to really do it themselves, so this play is a way of exploring the ideas.

[ADAM: this is a big under-explored area. Looking at the real-life themeparks designed for children to play at being differet adult professions for a day (now live in 7 different countries, IIRC!), it would be good to do more of this stuff, I think]

Social MMO: we’re UGC, open-ended [self-defined by the users], not a game.

With industry people lookign at games as VWs, theres strong polarization, and people see them as mutaully excusive. I think that’s complete bull, and they are mutually supportive, and should be combined.

In general, though, the exampels of integrations you think of, like WoW, the built-in systems are really ONLY supporting games, and never social.

We’ve been trying to boost the game mechanics without killing the social experience. We’re tryignt to balance ourseves a bit better [showed Schubert triangle], be less extreme.

[becoming unfocussed?]

Problem: our socila interaction is really very hardcore. we see a 95/5 split (top 5% of users spend as much time in habbo as the rest of the world put together). Thankfully the spending doesnt follow the same distribution, its much more even.

Social value erodes quickly – if you leave for jutst a short while, when you come back you need to spend a lot of time/money re-building your reptuation, your set of currently cool items, etc.

[interesting graph of excitement vs time since joining: shoots up, then suddenly drops 60%, then bounces back up to 99% where it wavers around forever more]. My job as a designer is to get people to surive the Valley of Death after their initial enthusiasm, while they’re becomign overwhelmed and lost and fristrated, and before they get subsumed into the community and feel comfortable wihtin the expeirence.

Users can tell how old a players account is simply from glacning at their avatar clothing because its so hardcore in terms of knowing what dress culture is current, older, etc. It makes it very very hard for new users to break in to the social structure.

[ADAM: reminds me of Eve]

new users reactions: expected to be able to “earn” something (levels, etc) by playing; expected a lot more “game”-ness to it.

So … we’ve been adding mechanics. Sticking to ones that ?dont? have direct social meanings, or that support social value. Even if your’e not paritcupating actively in the social circles, you have some game stuff to do and enjoy.

1st thing: achievements. An additional in-game currency (earned)

Looking at other eperinces, people dont tie together all their features. So we set out to tie all our new suff together from the start.

Added “goals for noobs” to help people through the start.

Feedback: lots of unhappiness, but habbo users alwasy reactionary against new stuff unless it benefits them. Looked into the people who ran the anti-achievement group, foudn they were some of the top achievements-eaners in the entire game. But also some very positive repsonses, people loved it, provided context for what they do.

2nd thing: buying pixels, andother in-game currency (paid)

We’re using the earned currency as a scaracity model. It used to be that you could use money to buy anything/everyting in world. Now we can sell stuff with high earned-cost thing that forces people to earn as well as pay, supporting people who want to do goal-oriented play and have meaning

[ADAM interesting how reactionary USA companies were over doing any pay-for-advancement, and some still do, whereas Habbo is pay-only, and just seeing "some" benefit from "allowing" GOP, rather than obsessnig and assuming "people ONLY ever want GOP"]

[ADAM thought: does Habbo have a powerful enough search system for finding all these interesting rooms that Sulka is showing?]

33% of users said that it was difficult to show others the are cool or have done somethign well.

42% said it was difficult to know if others THINNk they are cool have done something well

Perhaps this is a teenager thing, that peopel are more uncertain about how they are perceived than by how they are.

3rd thing: Respect, antoher currency (earned, but giftedby other people, not self-earned)

“respect is worhtless because everyoen cna get respect” (quote from player)

It take peoepl a while to work out “what to do” with any new social tools. When you put it out, they arent’ sure what the socially-acceptable uses are going to be. So, 3 months (long time in this world) after laucnh they asked what people were using it for:

- weclomg new players, making them feel happy
- renaming it “love” and gifting it to GF/BF

Now, 76% of users say they are trying to earn the level-cap achievement for Respect (big change from launch, with the strong negative feedback, and the claims that it was fundamentally useless and terrible and would ruin the world).

23% of users have been paid to give Respect. It’s now a signficant driver of the economy.

Social mechanics change slowly, it takes a long time for people to decide what to do with them, to find ways of using them, to adpt it.

In the words of Raph: Chat is not enough. This is true, it carries you a long way, but you can go / need to go a lot futher.

Questions

how do you gather the feedback that you get from users, and how do you process it?

lst year we did 9 big releases, after each we did a huge poll of the users. Mix of feebback on concrete aspects of the change, and forward-looking statements so that we can later re-ask those post-release and see how good the predictions were / how much opinion has changed over time.

We follow fansistes too, but the forums are dominated by the loudest voices. Distribuiton of percentage of people that like/dislike a given thing is radically different between forums and questionnaires.

what %ge of time are people devoting to these new game-like mechanics?
why didnt you implement more of those mechanics yet?

Wev designed achievements as a dise product of regular actvitiy more than something you have to change your behaviour to achieve – you would get there eventually anyway for a lot of them, just be being an active, normal, good member of the social community.

how much detail are players asking for in the logic of mechanics?

we get asked for eveyrthing that exists in any game in the world, and thousnads of responses contunuosly

[ADAM: they have so many users that they're inundated with any requires you can think of; I think the questioner (worked for a company making game-creation suites, wanted to know if there was ]

have you woven in any narrative to the world?

tried some, mostly just to help new users understand the mechanics of the site and what your’e trying toa chieve.

but the world changes so fast that everytiem we put in some narraitve, it becomes out-of-date within a few weeks (the UGC fads move on too fast).

also teenagers seem to hate being given an on-rails narrative path of how they “should” be relating to the expeirence, instead of just explorng for themselves

but we do run a lot of social events where we soft-seed ideas and peices of narrative, and leave it to the players to volunartily role-play stores and ideas based on that.

Summary

Conference organizer introduced this as “during this first talk, think about the platform they’ve made, as much as you do the game; that could be especially interesting for this audience”.

I totally support the principles and the ideals. The game looks fun and interesting, and at the same time taking a very “Don’t worry, be crappy” approach to core game design: lots of classic mistakes made, obvious stuff. Is this a case of being brave enough to deliberately make the mistakes they understand (because they’re easy to fix later when you’re more successful – and it leaves you more spare time to focus on fixing/avoiding the mistakes you don’t understand yet) – or just naivety?

Interesting to hear the philosophy that fed into the creation of the game, the speaker’s personal journey and how it informed the design. On the other hand, I was a bit disappointed how little actual content there was in this talk. It was perhaps 50% or more made up of a few long video clips. They were long and very little was pulled-out / emphasised from them. Most had very little information content per minute. Worst example was a mildly entertaining video of one of their players giving an intro to the product – but, frankly, so what? This was “new” and “interesting” 4 or 5 years ago, but by now it’s happened thousands of times over, and we’ve all seen it for many games. I didn’t understand why we were watching it.

I have a sneaking suspicion that – given he’s a VC – the speaker was pitching that video stuff to show “look, we have players who love our game”. That’s interesting and exciting to investors who have little or no immersion in the online world, but IMHO for game developers that’s just par for the course these days. No?

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

Background

I started off doing startups in the cryptography, privacy space. We wanted to protect civil liberties. Dot com crash happened, things went back, and then my younger brother was diagnosed with cancer. Left the industry to spend time with him while I could.

After the funeral, I knew I didn’t want to go back to security industry etc. Went to TED, saw things on the Science of Happiness etc. In particular, a talk by Robert Wright (author of NonZero). Cited a “death spiral of negativity” in the world today.

[video of Robert speaking at TED]

Robert: “all the salvation of the world requires is the intelligent pursuit of self-interest in a disciplined way”

My partner met with Jeff Skoll, who’s using movies for social change. At the time, he was making GTA4, a stark contrast.

[video: As real as your life - michael highland [featured in dave perry's own TED talk]]

[video talks about games as powerful form of brainwashing, but suggests that brainwashing can be used for good, not just bad]

How would we get leverage, get to scale easily and to a very large audience of people?

How could we harness the crowd of the entire internet to make the world a better place.

Looked at social media. Youtube videos, facebook microgames/use as a social metagame. These things show that massive self-organizing collective action is possible. If we could just get a large enough group of people together we were sure it would work.

Then we looked at open source too. Wikipedia as a Knowledge-War game, and the artificial danger of wiki-wars motivates good actors to work harder and make better shared free knowledge, that they wouldnt do without the griefers.

Aiming to use erotic commerce: eros (emotional / gift economies) as opposed to logos (direct exchange/barter of goods as a contract). Reputation in logos economies is based on accumulation … in eros economies, based instead on emotional connections.

Core principles we picked

1. Witnessing – public displays
2. Reciprocity – your status is related to how much you give back
3. Social Reputation
4. Organic and authentic

Design goals we picked

1. positive social game
   • no PK

   • no “negative modes of play”
   • based on gift economy
2. players are affected “positively” while they play the game
3. commercially successful so that I could fund social projects and philanthroy afterwards

[ADAM: "no PK"? Everyone has to be nice? Interesting. Default expectation would be: that's not going to work. This game, of course, is architected to change human behaviour - so they might manage to make this work through a recursive "fix ourselves by being successful" success - but I'd imagine it's going to make their jobs much harder, doubling-up on their problems. Given he name-checked Bartle types etc, I'm surprised there was no explicit recognition of this problem during the talk]

We felt that MMORPG wasnt wide enough in its appeal, and they take too long to play, so we went for “something casual” as our target.

Didn’t want to do “virtual world as a space” because e.g. ClubPenguin players “grow up” and then stop being interested in that product.

Aimed to hit a wide audience – 0-75+ years, male, female, different communities, etc.

Ultimately: how do you get on Oprah’s couch, and get her audience interested in games, because that’s hitting “mass market”?

[ADAM: I love that as your measure of mainstream success. I'd like to see "are you on Oprah's Couch yet?" get picked up as the measure for games. It's a lot better than some of the ones people currently use :)]

Looked at Webkinz as a great example of a success simultaneously on the commercial and motivational side.

Looked at Jane McGonigal, and at ARG’s in general (e.g. The Beast). Beast players were still looking at movie posters with suspicion many years after the game ended – this really (permanently) impacted the way they see the world around them.

Collision of online/offline worlds

Focus on the collision of online/offline worlds. Examples:

• geocaching [he gave a brief explanation of geocaching here]
• couchsurfing [ditto]
• bookcrossing [ditto]
• SFZero
• Where’s George?
• GoGame

…so we concluded that we wanted to do a “Social Reality Game” [as opposed to ARG?]

[CNN clips of people "giving-forward"]

[cited the starbucks in seattle where no-one pays for their own coffee, but ... theres a huge difference there: in that situation, you never pay for your own coffee, but you (implicitly: must) pay for someone else's instead. It would have been interesting to explore how that affects it, that it's seemingly a very literal zero-sum situation, but in fact turns out to be more than that. Akoha, as far as I know, isn't even zero-sum on the surface; there's no trade, it's all one-way gifting instead?]

[showed example Akoha cards. No PXC namecheck? :)]

[video: another long video, this time a fan video from youtube of an enthusiastic guy explaining it, and doing some missions. ADAM: By this point, I'm really not sure what the point of the video was]

Mission cards are tracked on a googlemaps interface, etc [look this up online if you haven't seen it already, this part was just a brief/fast explanation, running out of time in the session]

How we get to leverage/scale is what’s most interesting. What we’re going to do is decks for different audiences. We won’t do most of them. We want to get hte community to deign their own cards, design games for their own communities, on top fo the Akoha platform.

[ADAM: spot the VC :). Gets excited about the concept of owning a new Platform]

Partners

• online
• retailers (e.g. walmart)
• partners (e.g. starbucks)
• print-on-demand
• social networks

People will be able to link their custom decks to a charity of their choice.

We’ve had around 3,000 missions in 37 countries during our beta test so far. Starting to hit problems:

• loss of agency (act of faith that players who are passed-on the card actually carry on; 60% of all cards are disappearing from the system; you are totally dependent upon other people to move YOUR avatar forwards, because you give away all their cards as part of the game. Then you get bored because you have nothign lef tto do until/unless the recipients carry on the game for you and keep your cards moving)
• feedback systems
• scoring of community missions (gaming the system)
• moderation of community designed missions

[ADAM: well, some very classic obvious problems there, all easy to predict when writing the business plan, way before development started. No surprise. The scoring one has, I know, stopped people from trying similar games before because they couldnt see a way around it. This is going to be interesting to watch and see how they deal with them]