Broken Toys

On the last point, I attended the endcap town-hall meeting, where I (and several others) raised the issue of overcrowding. I don’t think the event was overbooked so much as having poor choice in room assignments, particularly Room 1, which was both the smallest room used for regular tracks, the second-closest to the registration tables and the most frequently full. And then they wisely moved the track there to Ballroom A, but not before a whole lotta people missed Gordon’s speech, Jessica and Brian’s speech, etc. etc.

Gordon was on the town-hall panel, reminding us that while CMP pwnzors the event, the local advisory board is still (mostly) the same Austin people. I suspect the event managers got down to Austin and surveyed the physical plant early enough, but the registration tables were in a much better spot, in the corner beside the stairs instead of on the main concourse, but the checkin lines were still too long on Wednesday morning and the badges were poorly designed (you could read everyone’s name fine, but you had to squint to read where they were from, which was often lots more relevant.)

And the expo. When AGC started, it didn’t even have one to speak of. Now it’s an entire exhibit hall, and several people complained at the town hall that they didn’t have any time to visit it, because they were running around between seminar sessions.

I came to this year’s conference wondering how long the Austin Convention Center could continue to support the ever-growing conference, and I still wonder that. CMP bought this thing out in part because they know it’s growing, and it might be beyond anyone’s control, beyond posting armed stormtroopers to administer beatings to paid guests, to stop it from growing. Hell, there was an indie developer from Bermuda who showed up and complained there wasn’t any information about bus schedules or all the available hotels in downtown Austin, instead of just a few, and he wasn’t the only one saying indie developers should get a display spot for pitching their games to publishers next year …

… yeah. I left at that point. Gordon can probably tell you more.

“Still, there was quite a bit of good takeaway even for those of us who still obsess over combat resolution tables and permadeath arguments, mainly in the wisdom of seperating interface from core design and developing massively parallel game systems rather than trying to force everything into a traditional competitive model (which I think is actually part of World of Warcraft’s success).”

Any chance you can expand on this a bit? Or a lot. I think I get what you’re trying to say, and yet I’m still completely lost.

>>Morhaime’s address was, well, um. I liked Rob Pardo’s keynote last year. So did Morhaime, as much of his was cribbed from it. He also reinforced some points that literally everyone watching the presentation should know. “Blizzard is known for polish.” “You probably shouldn’t release your game early.” “You may want to consider having a test server.” Then again, I bet Morhaime drives a much fancier car than I do.

Bethke: I think WoW would be better if I could buy a boat and live in it. It’s done a lot of thigns right. I think Blizzard should sell gold. I would buy it.

And I wonder how these people can be in this industry.

I don’t know what Raph is making, but I hope it will work like the “pied piper of Hamelin”. Take all of them, and carry them to another industry. So they can leave alone this one and do they thing SOMEWHERE ELSE.

Something like a madhouse.

The short form of my key points was

- design the systems so that they can be displayed umpteen possible ways. Do not design in such a way that it requires a given rendering. Yes, this throws out a bunch of kinds of games.

- design the systems so that they can have any interface at all. And any interface users might want. Yes, this also throws out a bunch of games.

- design for “massively parallel” — meaning, games which can be played at any rate the user wants, in small bites, in teams without predefined roles, where users measure themselves against each other in the metadata or metagame, not in the “game” proper.

Bethke: I think WoW would be better if I could buy a boat and live in it. It’s done a lot of thigns right. I think Blizzard should sell gold. I would buy it.

And I wonder how these people can be in this industry.

I don’t know what Raph is making, but I hope it will work like the “pied piper of Hamelin”. Take all of them, and carry them to another industry. So they can leave alone this one and do they thing SOMEWHERE ELSE.

Something like a madhouse.

I hate to say it, but get with the modern world. WoW WOULD be better if if offered more expressive choices — better for both users AND developers. If WoW added housing in some fashion for free, damn near everyone would go get it. If WoW added housing for an extra fee, WoW’s profits could probably double.

This is not a Pied Piper situation. There are more people in our current market who play on the kinds of worlds that Erik and I are talking about that there are playing all the AAA MMOGs combined. And if you stretch out and take a look at the way web apps are converging in, the AAA game space starts looking, well, small. For all of the core market’s disdain for stuff like Maple Story, well, Maple Story is bigger just in NA than basically the entire AAA MMOG market in the West.

The concern should be about the current AAA developers being left behind and becoming irrelevant. And if they keep skipping talks like the Habbo one and the Nexon one (and the K2 one, and so on) they do run that risk.

Hi !
I think people should concentrate to also look into the other alternative MMOG development. Looking at the turnout for Habbo and Kart Rider it was disappointing, as life-span for such casual games and communities out-live many other MMORPG certainly. Should any one reading this blog whom is interested in ;

[] Custom Made Avatars Communities and Virtual Worlds

Contact me at : calvin@ilemon.cn

We custome design OEM avatars communities / virtual communities in China.

Take a deep look at GDC and when 2008 comes … you will see how BIG these “community MMO” had becomes …

Calvin
http:dragoncalvin.blogspot.com

Yeah, that was the other thing. They probably turn a profit and are great for alternative funding methods like merchandising and in-game ads (which Habbo does a lot of, and they’re usually fun) but they’re not more successful just because they have more people playing them. They’re just more popular.

I guess that’s a tonic against everyone trying to copy WoW and flooding the market with even more fantasy-themed MMOs — but I don’t know if half-assed copies of anything is a good idea, and stupid money being thrown at such projects isn’t going to be good for the market. Or anything else.

My point is that not only there were two different panels going on as they said, but also two different industries going into two different directions.

And ideas that make perfectly sense in one industry can be ideas that are totally insane for another (so I consider counterproductive to consider them part of the same world). That’s what I think Jacobs and Hickman were trying to say.

I don’t argue that the Bethke guy isn’t good at his job, but his comments on WoW were stupid on a level not even believable. It’s really a different industry and the WORST that can happen is to have guys who believe they understand everything and try to see everything through the same glasses. I’m a spectator on THIS side of the industry that I think I can understand fairly well, and I don’t step into the other pretending to make intelligent comments and criticism. So I also expect that those on that other side don’t step into ours pretending they know better. They don’t. They are clueless. And I’ll laugh in their faces if they say they can run a WoW better than Blizzard.

I don’t even follow Raph anymore. Till he doesn’t explain concretely what the hell he is doing in practice, I refuse to follow his line of thoughts. His way of “designing systems” torn apart from interface, context, fiction etc… is for me the hugest mistake you can possibly do. It’s the anti-game by definition. But once again I’m not even sure we are talking about the same industry. Maybe they have some resemblances, but so bland that it’s not even useful to consider these things with the same approach.

His games aren’t our games and it’s a mistake to compare them. It’s a mistake to discuss them in the same panel. It’s a mistake observing them with the same approach. It’s a HUGE mistake designing them that way.

I often ranted about Out Of Character game design. Then retrofitted into a setting. I’m for the exact opposite philosophy. Game systems thought from the inside, to simulate exactly that experience that you want to roleplay.

I was looking once again to that masterpiece of Dwarf Fortress and noticed a page that is a bottomless source of the purest kind of inspiration. Just scroll down till the “Threetoe’s Stories, and Analysis” section begins. Just read randomly some of those points. They are gaming excellence. Pure potential.

And the way they found them is exactly the way I think game design should be:

One method of coming up with fun ideas is to write stories.

The stories were analyzed by Threetoe and Toady One for game content. A story’s analysis tries to include only those ideas which haven’t already been added to the development pages or a previous analysis. This means that you’ll find some of the most basic elements in the earlier analyses.

They write stories, the “metaphor”. And then they use them to extrapolate potential “game” elements.

Raph’s idea of games isn’t anymore about stories. It’s about exercises. Mind challenges. Abstract problems. All these are also “games” by definition, but they don’t communicate a darn thing. They are pure theory lacking any emotional involvement. They are dry. Pure shapes with nothing inside.

P.S.
My comment on WoW’s adding boat house was because housing in general is an ALIEN concept in WoW. People (players and devs) discuss housing in WoW for one reason: a me-too feature.

Because housing in WoW would serve NO PURPOSE at all. If not bludgeoned into the game by nerfing the Auction House, for example.

In DAoC housing made sense ONLY because they put forcefully there systems that could have been independent form housing. Such as teleporting, NPC vendors, player-to-player sales. They could be everywhere, but put in the houses to give houses a purpose.

In WoW there isn’t any space in the world that would fit housing. Creating an empty landmass to litter with houses would be a very bad idea, out of place in the world. And instancing would also feel out of place. The only way to justify housing in the game would be by forcefully limiting the gameplay through dependencies. Like adding new guild features that are only accessible through guild houses.

The point is that housing is an empty envelope in WoW that would make sense only if supported by other game mechanics completely external to housing.

So WHY a player would need an house, on the land or on a boat? Maybe you can use the boat to move, but now you have a fucking FLYING MOUNT.

If anything housing in WoW would just DAMAGE the little social aspect is left. If you can port from your house, train from your house, access BGs from your house, access the auction house… You would never need to step into a city anymore.

In PvP housing MAKES SENSE. As long you fight for territory and you may lose it. But in PvE housing makes no sense. You don’t pass time in the game sitting on a chair. You do quest, join raids, trade. Away from home. There is no game for you sitting in a fictional house. It’s stupid. It’s unnecessary.

If people think about it is not because it would make a better game, but just because they are smashing their heads at the wall thinking about the stupidest ways to ask money to the players. When there are MILLIONS of cool features just waiting to be implemented that are PERTINENT to the game.

You NEVER EVER can ran out of ideas when building a MMO. Never ever manage to shrink a wishlist. And housing in a PvE game would be at the very bottom of the list.

Housing made sense in UO, and it will make sense in another game only if those houses and player-run cities will completely REPLACE an NPC world. Give the players a completely empty world with no services, and in that game housing would be the best thing you could ever imagine. Make players build roads, towns, organize their own services and so on. It would be great. WoW is another game, and needs its own game design.

Player-run world, and housing makes sense. NPC-run/passive world, where the player is merely a tourist, and housing makes no sense.

Player housing is popular for players as it triggers the same sort of response as “The Sims” does – you get given a room/plot of land/house, various furnishing & decorating tools & widgets, and told “This is yours – have fun”

Take a look at EQ2 – there is no real need for player housing any more (you get some extra storage space, but sales can be done through their version of the auction house) but people still spend time and effort decorating their rooms.

I mean, if player housing was purely functional, everyone in EQ2 would have the basic (cheap) room with only the freebie furniture you get, but that’s clearly not the case.

There’s a fundamental appeal to at least a certain percentage of the typical diku-derivative playerbase to be able to invite friends/guildmates/random strangers into their house and pointing out their stylish interior design, PvE trophies and delicate handmade trinkets made by the hardworking natives of wherever.
It’s the Ikea nesting instinct translated flawlessly into a virtual format. It doesn’t have to have a purpose to be successful & desireable.

(And seriously – “instancing would also feel out of place”. In WoW? Really?)

Demosthenes: “Raph is about the only person I’ve seen anywhere who’s ragged on Bioshock”.

Not the only one: http://tinyurl.com/2hu2bg.

I should note that Scott’s website included the period in the url link, so you’ll need to remove that to see the review.

I don’t understand the thing about separating interface from core design.

kalain: “If you just mean UI mods, that doesn’t really throw out any games I can think of. UI mods are simply the way information is returned to the user.”

Probably the thing I hate most about WoW is their UI design and overall UI strategy. Having an API that modders can author against does not excuse you from providing a functional stock UI. Yet with WoW Blizzard has regressed MMO UI to Diablo circa 1997 and foisted off all responsibility for fixing it on players who are stuck continually dl’ing, configuring, and updating 3rd party addons written by amateurs.

I’m guessing kalain is right in that this has to do with a broader platform agnostic approach but I’m still not seeing it. How can you even have a game design without an explicit interface?

Games are not stories, but the opportunity to tell stories with games as a framework is always there, and telling good ones adds to immersion and brand loyalty, especially if players get a chance to hook their own stories into the greater story.

I know you have to be the CEO, Raph, but talking about ROI as a justification for everything really isn’t going to impress anyone but money men. I’m not going to play every game in existence.

While I was definitely raving and half-drunk, I still stand behind some of those points I made.

I didn’t mean “story” as “plot”, but in a wider sense of evocative potential. Dwarf Fortress isn’t a good “game” in a technical sense, nor it’s visually pleasing. But it drew from a myth. It’s heavily inspired by that myth and its mechanics aren’t driven by trying to be a good game, but just aim straight for that original inspiration.

It’s not anymore playing about abstract labyrinths, we play our culture (real and fictional). This happens everywhere. I recognize that games are their own thing, but we mostly play games for what they communicate. We play PLENTY of bad “games” but that are highly praised as an unique experience. Bioshock is mostly a rollercoaster and surely far from being an excellent “game”. But it is successful because it draws the player there. It builds a consistent fiction.

Not as plot. But as a consistent fictional sphere. It’s immersive. It’s visceral. It draws you in.

The game part of Bioshock is way less visceral and well oiled. The game was actually deliberately gimped so that it wouldn’t get in the way of the experience. So the “combat” becomes more of a gimmick than a core aspect.

The more we go on, the more medias blur together. TV series today draw heavily from comics, and comics draw heavily from TV shows. The culture is in the center and what matters for mass success isn’t the technical perfection. What matters is the power of communication. Leverage on some strong elements we have in common. Some shared myths.

Players play more City of Heroes because they buy on the ideal of creating their own heroes than for the actual “game” coming after. That’s the drawing strength. Players love to impersonate those fictional figures that hold a value for them. The “game” is merely a way to enhance the experience, but that experience is being held on the fictional ideal.

When you play Guitar Hero you feel like that fictional ideal of the guitarist of your favorite band. Of course the “game” is important, but first comes the “roleplay”. The impersonation. Make you believe. The embodiment of those values you want to explore.

We play games set during the world war, today more and more games fighting against terrorists. System Shock (another bad “game” but wonderful experience) was pure cyberpunk canon.

Why graphic is so important today when from the “game” perspective is irrelevant? Because the graphic is the MOST powerful evocative tool. And THAT’s what people crave.

I’m starting to believe that making people have fun in a game is about as hard as make them laugh. It’s not anymore enough to overanalyze.

A few things there…

1, you seem to be talking about immersion. It’s a powerful draw, but mainly for the core gamer audience. There are whole audiences who value other things more, according to market research. (Me, I am an immersion guy myself, so I relate, but I am also aware that it’s not the be-all end-all).

2, I still think that “designing for everywhere” actally aligns very well with what you are describing.

The ROI on Habbo may be much better, but that doesn’t mean that you can just make multiple Habbos and make more profit than on WoW. You can’t stuff an arbitrarily large amount of capital into an investment at fixed return. It’s practically a given that if Viacom makes ten of them, each one will be less profitable than the original.

When is the last time you’ve seen Tetris on the shelves at full price?

Here I disagree in the extent I was misunderstood, which is frustrating because I’d like better to disagree on solid points.

From my perspective Tetris has not a powerful fiction, but WoW and sports game have it aplenty.

Again I didn’t mean the quality of plot, that’s why quest text isn’t important in what I mean. The consistence of the experience goes beyond it.

When you play a game like Forza, Gran Turismo or Need For Speed you either look for visceral realism or spectacularity. That’s evocative power. You are a driver in a world of speed. Today a driving game needs cool designs and a solid physics systems. Those aren’t “game” mechanics. The game is there to support the real feel, to suggest you are REALLY driving a car. To make it feel believable. You are drawing and shaping that feel from the fictional world of driving (whether it is biased toward realism or spectacularity), not from abstract game mechanics. When you see smoke, hear an handbrake, the engine… That’s fiction, not game. That’s consistence and it’s again about drawing you in. The myth of speed and badass car racer. You often have boobs today in car games, why? Because boobs and cars go together in our culture. So does street racing, or speed racing. You play again a game to roleplay and be there, in the same way you roleplay a football game that allows you to BE your team.

Cars are prevalent in our culture in the same way sport is. Not a case that in all sports games the licensing is so important. Be one of those guys is important for the fictional power it has.

Game-y games bared of all fiction usually fall back to handhelds and web games. The point is that they ARE a different way of designing stuff and one doesn’t overlap on the other. They are DIFFERENT products, which was my point. Different markets, which is why they need to be sold through other means.

The point is that a game-y game wouldn’t live on retail shelves at full price, and the same would happen if you turn the model. One of today’s full experience games would never survive if marketed in the way of web games. These are different industries to my eyes simply because it’s more practical to treat them as different things. Game design, imho, changes GREATLY depending on what you work. And game designers specializing on one would probably do very poorly on the other.

And, last point, the only reason why the female public today is biased toward the webby casual games is simply because there aren’t strong fictional alternatives for them. Games still talk to males prevalently. We lack a culture of fiction geared toward the other public. In particular if it isn’t mushy, sentimental stuff.

And when I talk about immersion I mean it in a broader sense. The kind of immersion you have while watching “Lost”. Even in that case you look for a consistent fictional world that can draw you in, meet strong characters and live a bit along with them. If you don’t want to call it immersion, call it empathy.

The game must say something about us. Playing Tetris is a different thing. You are just killing time as when doing crosswords.

I’m amazed Scott hasn’t yet comented on UGC taken to it’s logical extreme: Acclaim’s design competition. ‘We’ll provide a design brief and an oversight committee along with a bunch of freeware resources and you’ll make us a playable game please!’ I guess it beats paying a staff to do it for you.

When is the last time you’ve seen Tetris on the shelves at full price?

At every platform launch.

Today a driving game needs cool designs and a solid physics systems. Those aren’t “game” mechanics.

Uh… physics most certainly is game mechanics, and these days, the cool designs are also part of the game mechanics — stuff you unlock and buy with points and so on.

Game-y games bared of all fiction usually fall back to handhelds and web games.

Why do you say “fall back”? Why not “move forward”? A lot more people play handhelds and web games. Your language itself is revealing biases here. The same as you go on with the word “pretending.” Nobody is pretending anything. Your desire to have separate playing fields sounds like fear, honestly.

I can understand the fear, because to many, the rise of this sort of web game sounds like the death of the games they love. Well, it’s not death. It is evolution, though.

the success of WoW with its relatively primitive art is encouraging for costs.

WoW does not have primitive art. It has incredibly sophisticated art direction. What it has is relatively primitive graphics technology. Which was part of my point. Equating the two is exactly what I was saying you should not do to succeed in “designing for everywhere.”

Uh… physics most certainly is game mechanics, and these days, the cool designs are also part of the game mechanics — stuff you unlock and buy with points and so on.

Physics is not an abstract game mechanic, it’s game mechanics drawn from reality or the fictional idea of reality (when the physics is meant to be spectacular and not realistic, as in Ridge Racer or Wipeout). “C0ol designs” are stuff you unlock and buy even in real life.

Of course they are game mechanics, but they are game mechanics put there and used to reproduce a fictional world.

Why do you say “fall back”? Why not “move forward”? A lot more people play handhelds and web games.

Because YOU are biased. The kind of games I describe are clearly more elaborated and complicated. They require more time to make, they require more people, more specialists. They have multiple levels of complexity. Mine wasn’t a quality or preference comment, it was just a simple consideration.

YOU instead talk about EVOLUTION. As if your model is the “right” one meant to replace everything else. You have those claims of predominance and control that I consider silly. You laugh at big productions while saying the webby games are eating their launch.

Frankly, hearing you feels like you lost your objectivity and are just trying to impress to raise funds and attention for your company.

Me, I don’t have an hidden agenda.

“It’s these web 2.0 guys coming to our conventions to teach us as to run the business. It’s them laughing at WoW because they know better. It’s them pretending to be better designers. It’s them pretending to be the bigger market. It’s them pretending to have the hugest subscription base. It’s them pretending to make the more money and tap the largest public.

It’s Raph claiming that big budget games are dinosaurs. It’s him claiming who’s the king. “

@Abalieno: Uh wow. Did Web 2.0 steal your pony? I mean really…wow.
So you are the defender of the righteous MMO games? The ones who dare not try to appeal to more people than guys who like to pretend to be Elf women in chain mail bikinis? The ones that us the same business model from 10 years ago? I mean give it a rest. Games constantly evolve – this is another evolution for online games. Which will bring MORE people into playing online games which is good for every one making online games.

You obviously have some kind of axe to grind…but only the gods know why. ( I am still thinking stolen pony) I work mostly in the traditional MMO market. I do not feel threatened by Raph or anyone making any kind of game for that matter – why the heck do you?

If any kind of game gets more people playing games then I am freaking happy. Its another person one step closer to being a possible future subscriber to my next game.

Also – Tetris is a game full of immersion. I almost missed a flight once due to being immersed “in the game”. I did not need to be immersed in story. I did not need to believe I was “one of the blocks”. It sucked me in and blotted out the outside world – that IS immersion.

I sort of lost interest in all the counter arguments about half way through the thread. I would like to make a few points that I didn’t see earlier.

1. I won’t play any game which seeks to get revenue from advertising to me. I think the popularity of TIVO pretty well demonstrates that a lot of people are already oversaturated and will only resent you if you pile more advertisments in their field of vision.

2. I probably woudn’t play a game where spending on micro-transactions or RMT of some sort beyond what I would normally pay for a subscription would give some one an edge. I think a lot of people feel this way on principle, and I would go further to say that these people ( the principled ones ) are actually the people you want playing your games. They are the ones who treat eachother well, and help out newbs, and generally make a community welcoming enough that someone just starting out might decide to stay from having run across them. If you drive them off of your game so that you can make more money, you will be left with a less principled player base. Perhaps I think too highly of myself, but I believe it’s a mistake to actively select for people with lower ethical standards. I think you will pay for it with more headaches in the long run, even if that just adds up to not really liking the people you’re running the game for.

3. On a completely different tack, I for once ( it is very likely a first ) agreed with Abalieno on something. Player housing if done incorrectly in a game will make communities much less open and much more insular. In DAoC it pretty much depopulated all of the places people used to gather when everyone retreated to their own little Ivory towers. It made the capital citys ghost towns, which was just another nail in the coffin of replacing player losses with new players. I suspect you could probably design it with incentives to keep meeting in public places but that would have to be done carefully and integrally to the whole system of what housing does and doesn’t offer, or most of your player base will only see their friends and guildmates from that point on. CoH did a good job of this, bases didn’t really change how most people played much other than making travel a little easier ( it’s already very easy to get around ).

Personally, I just can’t believe that Raph actually compared LOLcats and HotOrNot to actual games in his slides. Umm, when did they become games? And what crack do I need to smoke to see them as such? =D

You don’t need to smoke crack to see that what’s really being discussed is alternative methods of parting people with their money for consuming digital entertainment, whether the experience is directed or user-determined.

MMOs and social networking destinations are both online services that seek financial profit from their user bases.

Western-model MMOs monetize users with box sales and subscription fees, Asian-model MMOs monetize users with free client/gameplay and the direct cash sale of virtual items.

This is a product of the nature of the industry in both geographies and the cultures that have evolved around them. 3 of the key points in Asian territories: is a 15 year history of a microtransaction economy (with supporting infrastructure) that began with cellphone internet access and per character text messaging; an additional layer in the games ‘retail’ industry known as ‘Game Operator’; and third, pc baangs. We don’t have this in North ‘All-You-Can-Eat-For-$2.99′ America.

The palpable tension you see between both camps is due to the fact that both are facing increased competition in their respective markets and as a result, must look to other means to compete for marketshare.

The MMO crowd gazes enviously at the sheer number of people playing massively multiparticipant online social spaces, while the MMOSS operators covet MMORPG ARPU.

MMOSS operators mock the dev cost of building and maintaining MMOs as well as the quaint old-school business model; the MMO operators look down their noses at the nickle and diming model used by the ‘FOTM’ MMOSS.

The reality of the future of the industry is somewhere in the middle, it is believed. Just how we’re supposed to get there, together, is the question at hand.

Gah, these endless arguments!! Going nowhere!

It really boils down to something simple, for me:

1. In any field, there’s craftsmanship, and art. High-quality craftsmanship and art are expensive. They lead the way. They set the standard. When they end up both spectacular and popular, they clean up like nothing else out there.

2. And then there’s business: make the most crap for the cheapest price possible, that’s good enough to look shiny enough to attract the average Joe who doesn’t know the difference between Gallo and Chateau Neuf du Papes. Why make and sell expensive wine when you can make cheap knockoffs that 90% of the market will never be able to distinguish as different from the originals?!

Raph and Eric and the rmt/micro folks are in the second category. Blizzard and “the dinosaur” MMO makers are in the first.

We do, admittedly, live primarily in a junk culture these days. The commies are winning, according to Raph & Co., and cheap goods for the masses matter more, I guess, than any further interest in high craft.

So I guess the industry mantra is, the sooner we can mechanize the mass production process for games, the better.