UUG

This is last call to buy tickets for the Toronto Unity Users Group, which runs tonight at the Gladstone Hotel. Here are some fast facts about Unity 3D to refresh your memory:

1. The game engine has been around for a number of years, but the recent port to the PC and the price reduction to FREE has garnered a boatload of attention.
2. It’s kinda like Flash, except it uses 3D graphics, and it’s actually tuned to make games. So instead of bending it to your steely will as Flash requires by adding 3rd-party physics, for example, Unity comes with many crucial game features right out of the box.
3. There is a world of opportunity in marketing for folks that can use Unity. Unity 3D games can be played directly in the browser. Advertisers looking for something shiny and new (“new”) will be plenty impressed by the technology.
4. Can’t do 3D? If you live in Ontario, there’s plenty of under-utilized, inexpensive talent coming out of the colleges and universities. It seems every school has at least one 3D art program, but the demand for these graduates is rock-bottom in the province.

Here’s an example of what Unity 3D can do in skilled hands:

MUG

On Wednesday, there’s a double-shot of Unity goodness. There’s a half-day workshop at George Brown College. After that, i expect most of the participants will pub crawl a few blocks over to Kensington Market, where the Rich Media Institute is holding the monthly Mobile Users Group for Games and Apps. They’ll be talking about (among other things) the u3dobject framework, which enables you to communicate between Flash and Unity.

When i read the MUG description, i was worried that it stepped on the UUG workshop. Then when i read about the content of the meeting, i was really concerned – not only was it stepping on the other event, but it was about Unity 3D! As it turns out, one event begins as the other ends. i know that the UUG organizers, DimeRocker, had met with Shawn Pucknell at the Rich Media Institute, so i’m glad that everyone is playing nicely together.

Streaming Colour Studios’ Owen Goss is a regular at the event. Here’s his latest vblog developer episode:

No Elbow Room

It wasn’t the case last week, when the Vortex Game Competition ran concurrently on top of the DIG London conference, which split a few loyalties. But as anyone who’s tried to organize a Christmas party in December can tell you, sometimes there are just no openings. Other times, the event has to happen because it’s reliant on a funding schedule – that was the case two years ago when interactive ontario’s GameON: Finance conference ran the week before GDC in San Francisco.

i am THRILLED that gaming is so red-hot in Ontario that the calendar is so packed with events. i sincerely hope that we all stay well-connected enough so that there’s enough breathing room in the schedule to give everyone a break. If you’re running a game-related event in Ontario, please check the calendar first to ensure that you’re not encroaching on another initiative. And if you know of any game-related events – in Ontario or abroad – that should be on the calendar, please feel free to add it to our events page and we’ll update the calendar PDQ.

One of those key areas is safety. Ask any nervous parent, and you’ll learn that the Internatz are packed with pedophiles desperate for their chance to lure underage netizens into real-life park bench trysts like digital pied pipers. It becomes a do-or-die mandate of kids’ virtual worlds to reasonably protect their inhabitants’ safety, or they could actually face fines, lawsuits, or – in the case of this article – bad press.

Green.com makes the standard claims of protection that have become rote in similar products. The safety blurb on their Parents’ website section proclaims:

Green.com is a unique online world where kids and their parents can safely gather, learn, and interact with each other. We know the challenges of keeping kids safe online. After all, we’re parents ourselves. Kids want to hang out in the cool places and look for stuff on the web. But you’ve heard the Internet scare stories, and you may think the Internet is just not safe, period. Not us. We believe it can be safe and still provide all the things kids can’t wait to try.

Alright – so far so good. As a parent who thinks the Internatz are a series of tubes, and whose favourite web browser is Google, i’m willing to take Green.com’s claims at face value and sign my kid up. But we at Untold Entertainment have a somewhat more rigorous test. We have Mr. McBadTouch.

The Advent Of Dr. FeelyFingers

We signed up for a Green.com account and, like any wise 8-year-old, lied about our age. We typed in some spare address in the “Parent’s email address” field, and off we went.

Meanwhile, we signed up for a second account, in which we would roleplay our Mr. McBadTouch character.

In this demonstration, the role of Mr. McBadTouch will be played by user WaterWaster. The role of the innocent preteen will be played by user markergreen.

We both chose one of the half-interesting, half-unsettling photo clipart avatars and met up in the desert area. Green.com’s visuals are definitely a point of difference, and it was refreshing to see someone trying a bold and different style. Even better, your character can instantly fly without having to grind up to level 70, as in other games. Insta-flying was very fun, and nearly distracted us from our child-luring mission. But never mind! On to the safety testing!

Our first task was to see if we could reveal personally-identifiable information like addresses and phone numbers. Best-in-class worlds like Club Penguin block access to numbers and address-related words like “street” and “avenue” to prevent this. Let’s see how Green.com fared:

(of note: having been part of a beta launch for a relatively unknown kids world, i am almost positive that EddieD is a Green.com staff member. “sweet moves dude” “your totaly radical!”)

So you can enter numbers into the chat. Hmm. Let’s try a phone number:

Uh-oh. That’s not good. Then Mr. McBadTouch and our victim decided to exchange IM addresses:

We’ve tried this exact same test in Club Penguin, and none of this stuff would have made it through their chat filter. i was beginning to wonder if the chat feature filtered anything, when the markerGreen avatar suddenly spat out “****”.

Ok – so the place has swear filtering, at least. i asked my cohort what he had typed. He said “i typed ‘nerd’”.

So Green.com’s priorities are lining up thusly:

• allow users to exchange personal information like email addresses, street addresses and phone numbers: CHECK
• allow one user to call another user a “nerd” : FORBIDDEN

Maybe it’s me? Maybe i have different priorities as a parent? i’d rather keep my child safe from indellible real-world physical abuse than inevitable virtual abuse.

In and through this conversation, user Sam, a Green.com moderator, chimed in with helpful warnings like “Please don’t share personal details.” The trouble is that he piped up after the fact, after the damage was done. In any truly safe kids’ virtual world, a moderator should have skewered my avatar through the heart and strung him up in town square to be made an example of, before i could squeeze out something like this:

i was a little relieved to see that there was a moderator in the room, but his presence raised two questions:

1. Could the moderator “see” the conversation in a separate room log, or did his avatar have to be on the same screen as the other characters to monitor the conversation? Green.com uses very long, scrolling environments, and it’s easy to miss out on a lot of dialogue.
2. If Green.com takes off, is a post-moderation strategy enough to police potentially hundreds or thousands of users simultaneously?

i decided to throw the Green.com moderators a bone and flag the fact that i should NOT be playing in their world, to see if they had any sort of killswitch or live kick/ban tool to boot my ass out:

IRL is a fairly standard web acronym by now, but i used it to underscore the importance of keeping your mods up to date on slang, acronyms, l337 speak, and filthy phrases. i remember one situation while i was working at a kids’ site where the player used a dirty Japanese word in his username. A lot of the kids knew what it meant, but the mods were clueless. They have to be like filth-busting ninjas, these mods – up on every trend.

But i digress. After revealing my nefarious plan, i thought for sure that the crack ace Green.com mods would boot me back to Timbuktu without so much as a parting gift basket, but no. All i got was another weak warning from user Sam to not share personal info.

And now, the money shot:

Of course, this is all just to illustrate a point. i don’t even know if there IS a St. Patrick’s park in Brandon, Manitoba. But despite Green.com’s moderator presence, and due to their lack of chat filtering, Mr. McBadTouch successfully set up a real-life meeting with one of the game’s players.

Fallout

Hours later, i received an email from Green.com (emphasis mine):

Dear Waterwaster,
Thank you for signing up as a beta tester with Green.com. Unfortunately, there is a concern with communications associated with your account. As a result, we have temporarily suspended your access to Green.com.

We are committed to providing a safe, child-appropriate environment on Green.com. Obscene language, bullying and other inappropriate interactions are not tolerated on this site.

If you would like to have your account reopened, please respond to this email with your confirmation that you understand and will adhere to the expectations of conduct for the Green.com community.

Regards,

The Green.com staff

It’s obvious that Green.com has taken steps to make good on their promise of a safe environment for kids. They have live moderators, chat filtering, and a kick/ban process. But they’re clearly not cutting it yet. Since it’s a beta, a certain amount of slack can be cut, but here are my early recommendations:

1. The live moderator needs to be able to see chat logs for the whole screen area, rather than merely snippets of it (i’ll leave it to Green.com staff to confirm that this is in place).
2. They need a good ratio of moderators to users so that things don’t slip through the cracks. The ratio we saw was good (there were only a few users in the world), but they have to be ready to ramp up in case the world takes off.
3. The chat filtering needs to get waaay better. Blocking numbers is an obvious first step.
4. The moderators need to be well-trained on slang and acronyms.
5. The moderators need instant kick/ban tools to prevent shenanigans and the likes of Mr. McBadTouch.

Finally, since the world is in beta and the safey tools have some way to go, the website should say as much. i should not see a gleaming white Dudley Do-right credo proclaiming the site as a safe space when clearly, it isn’t. That’s tantamount to plunking a 40-fathom shark tank in a toddler’s playground and posting a “Caution” sign next to it.

A kids’ virtual world will never be completely safe. But with so many developers flocking to the space, we need to do more than simply pay lip service to the concept of online saftey. Club Penguin, before the $700 million, spent the time to turn their chat filter into a fortress, to the point where i’m amazed those penguins are able to say anything to each other (aside from “Hello”, and that might not even be allowed since it contains the word “Hell”). Virtual world creators should either go above and beyond the minimum requirements of acts like COPPA, or simply refrain from claiming that their worlds are safe.

As a parent, if i’m going to throw my kid into the water, i appreciate knowing ahead of time that it’s filled with sharks so that i can monitor my child and respond appropriately, rather than read the “No Sharks” sign outside a shark-filled tank, and walk away leaving my child to swim alone.

Of course, i’m more the type of parent to climb into that tank and punch every shark in the face. But with a mother who was a child protection case worker for fifteen years, i’m wise to the fact that until we mandate a baby-having license, we can’t rely on all parents to do their job properly either.

Due to my addictive personality, i’ve avoided the more “hooky” or “hardcore” MMOs, and have likely saved a lot of pennies over the past few years. But when Wakfu is released, regardless of whether it’s even a good game or not, i may shell a few coppers for a chance to stare, goggle-eyed, at their horribly gorgeous artwork:

Be sure to visit the Wakfu site for full-screen shots that will make you weep!

In the interview, Ottilie crows:

The initial creatures come with 50 different parts, 20 powers and 4 objects that can be placed into the creature’s lair. The variety of parts and powers will allow players to create more than 3 billion visual combinations.

This is an extremely common attempt at impressing people with your virtual product: calculate all the possible permutations of your avatars based on the number of their component pieces. Ottilie is not the first person to try to dazzle the press with big numbers – this tired hack stat is dredged up again and again by designers desperate for something impressive to say about their work, and it betrays a lack of confidence in what could turn out to be a very lacklustre product.

What’s the appeal of 3 billion visual combinations when every kid picks the red dragon wings because they look the coolest?

A few years back, i worked with an outsourced game studio who said the very same thing about their avatars … there are FIVE body zones with TEN pieces per zone, which works out to ONE POINT FOUR ZILLION avatar combinations. (Math police: it doesn’t really, i know – but you get the gist.) They even went on to say that the colour pallette allows players to choose from over 16 MILLION colour hues.

16 million, eh? You don’t say. Are those the same 16 million colours we’ve been enjoying in every computerized paint program since 1993? (And aren’t 4 million of those colours indistinguishable variations of black, white, and bleh?)

Boasting about your avatar permutations is like a vacuum cleaner salesman proudly proclaiming “Our SuckMaster 5000 can pick up SEVENTY FAJILLION dust particles in a matter of minutes. FAJILLION, ma’am. That’s one hunnerd thousand herpillion.” If a salesman tried that line on me (aside from taking him out for calling me “ma’am”), i’d seriously doubt the efficacy of his product. The most impressive thing he could say about it was that it could suck up an impressive number of atomic particles. Suspicious.

How can i be so sure this is bona fide flimflammery? i’ve used the line myself in trying to trump up an otherwise weak product. i admit it. But i’ve seen the error of my ways. From now on, if i need to jazzercise up a feeble game, i’ll sing the virtues of its Blast Processing.

And (as a few of his readers were quick to point out), if Schuster thinks that in-game advertising is just now dawning, i’d really like to take a trip back with him in his time machine to whatever previous decade he’s writing his articles from.

i do believe that interest and expectations are inflated beyond what the market will bear, however. Just as investors sunk millions of dollars into dotcoms on or around 2000 and that bubble burst, the virtual world/MMO gold rush is sure to turn out a litany of bad projects, and the bubble will burst.

But look at us now: eight years later and the Internetz are still around. That’s because it’s too good an idea to just die off. Likewise virtual worlds and MMOs, which triumphantly return gaming to its multiplayer roots. The idea won’t die, but once this first spate of me-too projects launch and flop and a great many people lose their jobs and their money, i expect investors to become much more gun-shy of the genre.

Then, as i mentioned on the panel, once companies produce the proper tools to lower the cost of development, we’ll enjoy a much normalized multiplayer game industry. But believe me, before all that happens, the apparent end will come, and with it much tearing of robes and gnashing of teeth. Ultimately, i blame Coke.

Ad Nauseum

i get nervous whenever anyone new to the game says that his or her virtual world or MMO will be ad-supported, as if advertisers are knocking down the doors trying to snatch up banner space near (or overlays within) these properties. i’ve been building web games for eight years, since the crash, and they’ve almost all been ad-supported. i have war stories to tell.

The debate over in-game advertising rages, and the questions that pops up run along the lines “How much advertising will players accept in your game?”, “Does advertising cheapen the player’s experience?”, and “How can advertising best be integrated into your game without ruining it?”

i’ve seen industry “experts” debate this topic on numerous different panels, and they invariably involve Coke in the debate. Someone will say “For example, if Coke wanted to advertise in our world”, or “i don’t really think our players would tolerate the presence of Coke in our in-game tavern …”

i heard Coke invoked most recently at ICE 08 during the Worlds @ Play panel. The speaker was Barbara Lippe, whose company Avaloop is behind the virtual world Paper Mint. i’ll have to paraphrase her because i don’t have a transcript of the session, but she said something like this:

Players don’t like in-game advertising. If we were to do it, we’d do it tastefully. For example, if Coke wanted to advertise in our world, we wouldn’t want to have Coke actually represented in-game, for example by having Coke logos everywhere or by giving the player actual Coke product. It’s too intrusive. We’d do something much more subtle. The player might find himself on a Coke-sponsored island, but he wouldn’t know it until he walked the entire periphery of the island, and the little fog-of-war mini-map at the top of the screen slowly revealed the shape of the island, and the player would see that the island was in the shape of a Coke bottle.

Ms Lippe earned a doctorate, so i don’t want to suggest she’s out to lunch or anything, but come on. The attitude – and she’s not alone – is so naive that i can actually hear the moving trucks pulling up to offices around the world to repossess all those Herman Miller chairs that virtual worlds start-ups bought with their investors’ money.

News Flash: You’re Not Gettin’ Coke

Coke is invoked so often, of course, because it’s an incredibly strong brand, and probably one of the most recognized brands in the world. Why, then, would this brand behemoth be interested in advertising in your brand new virtual world to which you’re struggling to attract players? Coke has sponsored virtual worlds, sure, but by my count they’ve come in when the numbers were high enough and the opportunity was interesting enough to make it worth their while, as when Habbo Hotel was pulling in millions of visitors at its peak.

You should be so lucky to get Coke. And if you ever did land them, you wouldn’t dare try to sell them on a subtle campaign where a player would have to spend an hour walking the peripheral of an island to reveal the product-shaped outline on the mini-map. Coke would ask you to drop an enormous logo on the busiest screen in your world so that it obscured all the exits, and they’d ask that the word “the” in all chat phrases be replaced with “i like Coke because it is delicious and wonderful to drink”. And you know what? You’d do it.

You wouldn’t wax philosphical about how you’ll dilute the intellectual property or how the fanbase will criticize you for selling out. You’re running an advertising-based world, and as far as advertising goes, Coke is the holy grail. You will relax your muscles and allow the Coca-Cola corporation to ram its fistfuls of hot, sweaty cash wherever it so chooses.

But realistically, that’s not going to happen. You’re not gettin’ Coke. You’re not gettin’ Pepsi. You’re not even getting Fanta.

You’re getting V-8. And not the V-8 vegetable drink that everyone knows. That brand is plenty strong. No – V-8 is branching out into vegetable crackers to take on category leader Mr. Christie. That’s who wants to advertise in your world. V-8 Vegetable Crackers.

You’re not getting Nike. You’re not getting Reebok either. You’re getting Dr. Scholl’s. And not the Dr. Scholls insoles that are adored by millions. No – Dr. Scholl’s wants to market their new vegetable drink to take on category leader V-8. (And due to category exclusivity, you actually have to cook up a creative way to promote Dr. Scholl’s Vegetable Symphony without pissing off V-8.)

You’re not getting the latest Harry Potter movie. You’re getting the latest Cuba Gooding Jr. family comedy. You’re not getting Grand Theft Auto IV. You’re getting DS Barnyard Friends. You’re not getting Mr. Peanut. You’re getting NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts, now in a resealable pouch.

Advergaming is Nuts

And what’s more, whatever ad overlay you develop for your deeply serious medieval fantasy strategy collectible card game MMO has to specifically promote the NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts resealable pouch, and you must convey the brand attributes “portable” and “snackalicious.”

This means that one of the food items you offer in your game has to be NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts. And it’s not enough for the players to voluntarily buy them – you have to make the offer more appealing by ensuring that the NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch, when eaten, instantly jack the player’s hitpoints up 300%. And the item has to be reusable, because the sponsor is concerned the player will forget about them once the NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch is consumed.

And just to make sure that as many players as possible buy them, the NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch appear in ye olde item shoppe for free. And to push those numbers over the edge just a leeetle bit more, you end up auto-inserting the NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch into the inventory of all active players. And you qualify “active players” as being anyone who has logged into the game at least once since launch. And the beta.

There – that takes care of exposure. Now, to convey the brand attributes “portable” and “snacktastic”. The “snackalicious” one is easy – whenever the player consumes NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch from the magically-refilling resealable pouch, the avatar shouts “SNACKALICIOUS!!” at the top of his lungs, so that the chat line is broadcast to every player within a 10-screen radius.

You argue to the client that the “portability” of NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch is obvious, since the players can take the NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch with them anywhere. But the client is not convinced, so you slap a NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch logo on the front of ye olde items shoppe and add the tagline “You can eat em anywhere!”

In your final round of revisions, you’re only asked to change two things: upsize the ye olde items shoppe logo 250%, and do something about the fact that players can’t see the NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch logo because the inventory item graphic is so small. You say that nothing can really be done about the inventory item size, because that’s just how the game works, but just to appease the client, you build a special case into your code so that whenever the player rolls over the NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch item, it enlarges to reveal the product logo at a reasonable size.

And all this work is worth it, because it will help you run your game for another month.

One question that often arises is whether or not there are enough interested players to support the coming glut of virtual worlds and MMOs. i think a better question is whether or not there are enough advertisers to support all the supposedly ad-supported projects. i hear a lot of companies bragging about this or that license, or this or that merger that will help them bring Virtual World X to market with all the splendour of Jesus riding a cloud and blowing a trumpet, but i don’t hear any of them boasting about their investment in a strong sales team. i’m talking about a kennel full of guys who all drive Jaguars and work on a high-octane blend of 100% commission and cocaine, who can sell the shit out of your virtual world. These guys bring in the dough it takes to maintain the game and grow the audience so that bigger advertisers – like Coke – come calling.

It’s not enough to have your cousin Larry pick up the phone and cold-call Duracell. You need a sales team. You need a vicious, snarling sales team that can either close the deal or rip out prospective clients’ hearts with their slavering fangs. You need this guy:

And if you think, as some virtual world owners apparently do, that you can implement some magical rule where only advertisers whose products make sense in your game are allowed to advertise, i’d kindly ask you to crawl back into your sparkle-tree in Fantasy Land, and give my regards to your marshmallow pixie pals.

i await you all on the auction floor! i could use your purple-felt pool table and a few Aeron chairs if they’re going for a reasonable price …

i got to peer into the crystal ball a year ago at the 2007 Game Developers’ Conference, where i shot the breeze with someone working on the project. He said that VMK had no trouble attracting kids who lived outside and frequently visited America’s two Disney theme parks in California and Florida, due to the virtual-to-real-world ties the game offered. The real challenge was attracting everyone else. He also said that Finland was a sunless Hellhole and that he couldn’t wait to escape.

There you have it. Many factors at work. But if Disney’s career booth at GDC 08 was any indication, the company is making good on its promise to invest in virtual worlds – lots and lots of virtual worlds. It’s almost like they’re throwing virtual world spaghetti at the wall to see what will stick, because that one sticky piece is so gosh darned profitable.

In other news, Euro Disney somehow remains viable.

Certainly, Viacom/Nickelodeon’s acquisition AddictingGames.com isn’t exactly a bastion of quality. i was actually astounded when a supposedly reputable corporation like Viacom, with shareholders n’ everything, and a reputation for making quality kids’ entertainment, picked up AddictingGames. Let’s take a quick tour through the library shall we?

i dip into the Action game category and come across two gems. First up, there’s Light People on Fire, where your goal is to run around setting as many people on fire as possible. Innocent bystanders include (naturally) mothers pushing baby carriages.

A few icons down i notice Cannon Crotch, by “F****N Amazing Games”. In it, you must destroy Adolph Hitler’s reanimated corpse with your crotch-mounted cannon before he uses a laser to blow up the moon.

There’s High School Cheerleader, where your scantily-clad character pulls off dance moves in a low-cut top while pervy students watch from the background, and Blood Car 2000 Delux, which has you running down as many pedestrians as possible with your car. Blood Car 2000 Delux proudly states that it’s “Rated M for Awesome”.

No Ratings for Young Gamers

In all my time on the site, i didn’t see a single bona fide ESRB rating or content warning on any of these games.

Addicting Games is one of these online kids-only havens that adults don’t really know about. In every user-focus test i ever did with a room full of kids, we’d let them surf wherever they wanted, and inevitably they’d end up at Addicting Games. The site’s acquisition by Viacom/Nickeloden certainly ensured that adults heard about the site, but honestly: how many adults have actually played the games there? i assume most grown-ups who have visited Addicting Games have followed the link after reading about the acquisition in the trade papers and, after seeing the overwhelming array of icons, promptly left.

i worked at a teevee station that received regular viewer complaints about its programming, most of which came straight outta CrazyTown. One father was very upset that some characters in a show were pretending to be pirates, because pirates “rape and murder people.” Over-protective, i think, but somewhat fair. But imagine the gasket this guy would blow if he found his kid poking around on Addicting Games.

It’s a lot like the fact that Video Games Teach Kids to Gamble. No concerned grown-up ever bothered to drill 20 hours into a Pokémon game to find the full-fledged casino. Likewise, no adult seems to care that while teevee adheres to some pretty tight moral standards, the kid-targeted online world is packed with crap. What’s worse, the people behind this site aren’t shadowy, hard-to-find folks like pornographers – they’re bloody Nickelodeon. It boggles the mind.

Concerned Parents Gotta Step Up Their Indignation

i suppose that concerned parents can only be concerned about what they see, and they’re not bothering to see all aspects of kid culture. Maybe parents can only be so concerned?

Or maybe it’s another symptom of media dinosaur thinking, where somehow the teevee rules don’t apply to the Internetz? (see Building a Coffin for Nielsen) Who knows? You could even chalk it up to the old habit of thinking that certain kid-associated media are “safe” (cartoons, video games, etc). That mode of thinking has proven particularly tenacious.

Fed Up

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that i think playing Light People on Fire will turn kids into raving mad pyromaniacs, or that kids can’t see that the cheap autocidal thrills in Blood Car 200 Delux aren’t a great idea in real life. i just get a little peeved that parents like the Pirate Dad get so irmy about the slightest breach of ethics on teevee, yet Viacom is hosting this overboard, lurid junk-culture free-for-all online and no one says a word.

i worked for Big Media creating advergames for kids. i’ve had my fill of feeding junk to children; i feel the need to purge. The next product i create for children, if i ever hoe that row again, will uphold a solid value system. It will affirm the sanctity of childhood. And it will be a restorative, detoxifying experience for the kids fattening themselves on the trash fed to them by Nickelodeon and Viacom.

A while back someone said that it would take at least a $1 billion dollar super project to take on World of Warcraft. But maybe, as it was with the Roman Empire, the wolves at Blizzard’s gate will be countless smaller tribes made up of the so-called unwashed hordes.

There’s something very appealing about talk like this. It’s the “root for the underdog” spirit in me that really yearns for this kind of turnaround. It also doesn’t hurt that i happen to be the very underdog Bridges describes – a self-funded start-up with MMO ambitions. Of course, his talk should all be taken with a grain of salt, being that Multiverse is a MMO-building platform targeted at those same small teams to whom Bridges makes these promises.

Bringing Down the Old Guard

For part of Bridges’ talk at SXSW08, he mentioned how technology is chipping away at the root of the film and music industry power structure. i’ve had that conversation many times in the past few years, and in posts like To the Victor, the Eyeballs. The trouble that many of us young bucks face is that so many Old Guard media moguls are entrenched in antiquated ways of doing business, and have been getting so fat on those tried-and-tested methods for so long. The industry can only move forward with the help of two people: Mr. Retirement and Mr. That Guy Just Got Hit by a Bus.

Nielsen Shenanigans

Nielsen ratings are a great example of these entrenched business practices that are effing with my ess. The Nielsen company’s bread and butter is their television ratings system. It’s based on a sample. A sample of country-wide random families are assembled and given a box that tracks their teevee viewing habits. These data are used to keep certain shows on the air, and to pull certain other shows off the air. The shows that remain on teevee are, invariably, the ones that i don’t enjoy (Third Rock from the Sun, Everybody Loves Raymond), while the truly great shows get the axe (Arrested Development, Firefly).

Enough of my personal preferences. The flaws in the Nielsen system are many and varied, and should be obvious. Here are a few stories friends have shared with me that punctuate these problems:

1. Nielsen requires its families to expend a bit of effort. A friend of mine was in a Nielsen family in the 80′s. You had to tell the Nielsen box who you were, when you started watching teevee, and when you stopped. More often than not, his family would leave the teevee on after the show was over and absent-mindedly wander out of the room, forgetting to clock out of the system. Hours of television flickers by with no one watching it, and Nielsen carefully collects the data on what little Stephen, age 9, enjoys watching. (Dateline NBC, Stephen? Really?)

2. Sample groups might generate accurate numbers when you’re talking about the really big shows (CSI, Cheers), but when it comes down to the niche-market programming, things get a little flukey. A friend of a friend had a show on Canadian specialty teevee. Someone he knew became a Nielsen family. He offered to pay the guy to watch his show whenever it was on, to help the ratings. All of this is, of course, highly dodgy and quite possibly illegal. But whatever. Listen:

Every so often, the Nielsen guy would forget to watch the show. Maybe he took ill, or went out for a cheeseburger or whatever. As a result, the show’s ratings would dip wildly, reflecting a loss of hundreds or thousands of viewers. The show’s fate basically hinged on whether one guy in the Nielsen sample remembered to watch it.

These days, we have the technology to determine who is watching a show and for exactly how long. We can also tell that viewer’s name, age, sex, geographical location, favourite bands, and deodorant preference. We can do all of this. We can determine all of these things right now with content we deliver on the Internet. But are Internet-streamed shows worth more to advertisers than the same shows airing on teevee? Somehow no.

An Empire of Misspent Money

Here’s another one: i used to build advergames targeted at kids. The sales guys, also part of the Old Guard, made their money based on the number of unique gameplays on these games. Certain games didn’t fare so well in that department, but when i looked at the stats, i’d see that they had (for example) a fifteen minute average play length. Fifteen minutes. That’s fifteen minutes of a kid actually interacting with your brand, staring at your sugar cereal logo and piloting your venerable mascot around the screen.

How much would a fifteen minute commercial cost you on teevee? A damn site more than you would pay for a game. And the kicker: Nielsen can’t even tell if the viewer is watching the commercial! Advertisers are paying all this money for a thirty second passive experience that viewers may not even be looking at, while a fifteen minute experience that engages the player and has him focussed intently on your brand sells for a minute fraction of that teevee ad. Sick sad world.

How Fast can a Dinosaur Run?

i was talking with someone from a large teevee station yesterday. He’s no spring chicken, but he’s embraced technology far more quickly than the stuffed suits at the top of the food chain. He told me that the station had a show aimed at young, hip viewers, which they scheduled for Friday night at 9. Logically, the young hip viewers were out cavorting and having anonymous sex instead of watching this show, so the show was cancelled. An impassioned viewer wrote a letter explaining that the slot was terrible but the show was great. She said that she and all of her friends (and she said they were many) taped the show via TiVO or PVR while they went out to do Jell-O shooters and make out with some guy who said he had an MBA.

Nielsen claims to know a thing or two about viewers’ PVR habits, but again, it’s all based on their nonsense sample system. They’re not factoring in things applications that auto-filter out commercials, and especially teevee piracy. If Nielsen was really a company worth its salt, they’d be tracking and researching torrents and filesharing to get a far more accurate picture of the content people actually value.

Don’t Fear the Reaper

Retirement or death. These are the only two factors that will allow the entertainment industry to move forward in a significant way. The Old Guard has to take its rapidly-dwindling pile of money and move over so that those of us who understand technology can move into the space and have our turn.

i think Tenacious D put it best:

Dio has rocked for a long, long time,
Now it’s time for him to pass the torch.

It’s time to pass the torch,
You’re too old to rock, no more rockin’ for you.
We’re takin’ you to a home.

And finally in 40 or 50 years, our grandkids can complain about how slow we are to adapt to nano-gleep gleep, and how we can’t use flying motion-sensing holo-wizwands for crap.

Bridges made some bold claims about the indie developer uprising during his session:

The talk turned out to be surprisingly inflammatory as Bridges predicted the death of the traditional video game industry in favor of near-universal adoption of virtual worlds.

Click to read SXSW08: Virtual worlds and indie games to dethrone publishers.

i can totally get behind the democratization of game development that ran rampant at this year’s Game Developers Conference, and i’m very interested to see where all of these game creation tools are headed. That said, i’m not very impressed with the Multiverse demos so far. They look dated and wanting.

Habbo Hotel visionary Sulka Haro puts it best when defending his game’s retro pixellated graphics: 3D is destined to look dated in a few short years, but 2D graphics have reached the point where an attractive 2D game is always going to look like an attractive 2D game.

… and then there’s Club Penguin.

Kid-targeted virtual worlds like Club Penguin and Webkinz were already making a killing by the time Raph Koster shocked the room at GDC 07 and said that Club Penguin does more business in North America than World of Warcraft.

It’s unlikely that many Americans, with their freedom fries and their hatred of the French, have heard of France-based studio Ankama Games. My colleagues and i in Canada have been following their work for years. They have some of the most eye-popping 2D artwork i’ve seen in all my life. While at E3 2006, i was able to snag a hardcover book filled with their artwork, and it remains a source of inspiration and drool to this day.

But who knew they could animate? The exciting news is that Wakfu is being made into a teevee series. Buckle yourself into your chair and check out this Wakfu teaser video:

These talks actually turned into “Start-up Horror Stories”. Here’s a sampling of the hair-raising tales people told:

My receptionist embezzled tens of thousands of dollars from me and moved to a different State.

i licensed and localized a game from Korea, and my North American publisher went bankrupt. i couldn’t do anything with the game because i didn’t want my publisher’s creditors to take the license away from me.

After we’d built our studio and hired our staff, our investor pulled out and took off with the money.

And so on.

What i found really interesting were the rags-to-riches stories told by successful CEOs in other panels. It was neat to see the common threads running through these sessions, which i present presently as a present to you:

Equity does not mean equality. Four successful CEOs were assembeled for Lessons from the Front Lines: Startup CEOs share their Insider Stories. 4/4 CEOs agreed that when starting a company, it’s not always the best policy to give everyone an even split. What happens when, in a year or two, Founder A is doing 20% of the work, but enjoys 50% of the company equity? Crabby and opinionated Erik Bethke, founder of Korean virtual world startup GoPets, suggested that a keen lawyer can help you set up your company so that shares are handled more fluidly. Shares can be redistributed as time wears on to more accurately reflect the contributions of the founders.

Hire good people. “i only hire people who are smarter than me.” So said Paul Wedgwood in his lecture Splash Damage: From Amateur to Triple-A in Five Years. This was echoed in a few different sessions as “‘A’ people hire ‘A’ people, but ‘B’ people hire ‘C’ people.”

Fire bad people. When the same four CEOs were asked what one mistake they learned from, they all said the same thing: they let poor performers stay at the company for too long. Get rid of people when it’s obvious that they aren’t a good fit for the company. There seemed to be a lot of untold, painful stories as the panelists winced and grit their teeth, imploring the audience to keep good personnel policies. Craig Sherman, adopted CEO of hit online community Gaia Online, said that this was tough to practice. He suggested paying outgoing staff more than their due to keep everything amicable, and to prevent ousted employees from bad-mouthing your operation.

Best New Game Announcement

i was pretty impressed with APB, the new multiplayer game announced at a keynote by Realtime Worlds. Realtime Worlds also developed Crackdown, one of my most favourite games from last year.

Expectations fell flat when i realized that APB was all about driving and shooting. The real hook in Crackdown was the Agility feature. You could ignore all the gangland violence like i did, and instead collect little green orbs that made you run faster and – most impressively – jump higher. Once your Agility rating was high enough, you could leap to the top of a nearby building and rain down bullety justice from above. This feature turned Crackdown into a platformer game – a sort of Super Mario Bruthas.

The game that really piqued my interest was Recoil: Retrograd by Zeitguys. Recoil is a third-person time-travelling game with a solid steampunk style. Steampunk is a “what-if” motif inspired by Jules Verne and HG Wells where steam, rather than electricity, became the dominant driving force behind technology. Steampunk style touchstones include brass goggles, wood, ornate trim, zeppelins, knobs, and wires. The high technology is always wonderfully low-tech. i’ve only seen a select few games that have achieved commercial sucecss using this style, most notably the Dark Cloud series and the huge hit Bioshock.

Neither of those games, in my opinion, went as far as possible with that style. Recoil takes it to amazing new levels; i stood staring at the demo, my mouth half-open, with the sheer volume of steamy goodness pouring out of the game. Their hype mission was helped along a little by the actors they hired to run around the expo floor in the most ass-annihilating steampunk costumes i’ve ever seen.

Easily the weakest session so far has been “Now That We’re All Here: Next Steps in Online Play Sessions” by Christopher Romero of Worldwide Biggies. The session title is extremely misleading. For the bulk of his talk, Romero did a project showcase of Nicktropolis, a virtual world on the website supporting US kids’ teevee network Nickelodeon. This was a little eyebrow raising, because the speaker admitted off the top that he no longer works on the project and, as he revealed later in the question period, he left the project between the open public beta and the mysterious multi-month gap that ensued before its live launch.

Ass-Tastic Graphics

Sitting through Romero’s presentation was painful. Quite literally painful. Painful to the degree that i had to HIDE MY EYES from the presentation screen while he showcased grabs of the game. This was for one simple, inescapable reason: Nicktropolis looks like ass warmed over and poked with a stick.

i’ve worked with a kids’ teevee company for over seven years, so i know how strict brand managers can be with their precious properties. i built one simple Flash game with a certain young female explorer character that Nickelodeon owns, and there were some very strict brand rules to follow. i couldn’t deviate from the colour pallette, i had to use an approved still shot of the character, etc etc.

Contrastingly, Nicktropolis takes beloved and tightly brand-managed characters like Spongebob Squarepants and makes them look like they were designed by college interns designing drunk. Back at the kids’ station i worked for, we received fan art that looked better than most of the stuff in Nicktropolis. It’s, honestly, really hideous stuff, and i’m amazed that Viacom promotes the project without the slightest hint of shame or irony.

The Opposite of Sticky

The functionality in Nicktropolis matches its ass-thetics. The virtual world is split up into multiple mini-worlds, many of which promote the station brands. This is the one aspect of the game where brand managers did seem to have input. A Tak and the Power of Juju avatar would not mesh visually with a Dora the Explorer avatar. In an attempt to solve this problem, the Nicktropolis un-gineers force the player to tool a new avatar whenever he enters one of these sub-worlds.

The result, as the speaker sheepishly pointed out, is that your very identity in Nicktropolis is stable as the shifting sands. One of the key hooks of participating in a virtual world is that you get to adopt and invest in an identity. Nicktropolis shreds this idea and throws it out the virtual window, resulting in a virtual world that is impossible to invest in personally and emotionally.

The real-life equivalent of this terrible idea might be a puppy that you’re not allowed to name, or having your own personal photo id card with someone else’s picture on it. Nicktropolis effectively answers the “Where am i” question, but flunks the “Who am i” test that’s so integral to virtual worlds.

Why return to an online community when you essentially have to wear a new body wherever you go? What emotional ties keep you tethered to that place? These are rhetorical questions. The fact remains that Nicktropolis failed at one – if not the – key hook in a virtual world.

Talk At Your Favourite Characters

The speaker spent a long time explaining the challenges he and his team faced designing Nickelodeon’s ChatBot system. This is a feature where you can converse with the station’s key characters using technology that dates back to at least the C64 where i first saw it. It’s little more than a text parser that analyzes certain key words and spits back an automated, robotic response. The C64 ChatBot i played with was a virtual shrink:

You: i like candy. Do you like candy?

Virtual Shrink: How does candy make you feel?

You: It makes me feel happy.

Virtual Shrink: How do you feel about happy?

You: Uh …

Virtual Shrink: Tell me more about your mother.

And so on. Even when i was eight years old and it was 1988 or whenever, this technology was fun for about five minutes and then we moved on to something else. You’re not going to convince anyone, kid or otherwise, that a ChatBot is bona fide Artificial Intelligence. You’re also not going to spend a whole lot of time interfacing with a ChatBot because frankly, the thrill wears off a little faster than your favourite chewing gum flavour.

And yet, Nickelodeon really pushed this feature on its release, ballyhooing the fact that you could “interact with your favourite Nickelodeon characters!” During launch week, i jumped into Nicktropolis and (after throwing up in my mouth a little), i beelined straight for Spongebob’s house.

And there he was! Spongebob! Or a reasonable facsimile. Well, more like an unreasonable facsimile, really. And he was … standing there. Staring. Staring at the wall.

i walked up to him with my horribly-animated anchovy avatar and, using the prohibitive white-label chat system, started asking him questions. i don’t think he responded. Even if he had, i’m not sure i could have been more disappointed.

Romero talked at length about how he and his team ate up a large portion of development time retooling the 3rd-party ChatBot solution to make the responses match the characters’ personalities. This, to me, is like meticulously decorating your dumpster bin. It’s not worth the effort to church up a fundamentally crummy feature.

What the dev team should have done was create a handful of what i like to call “puppet avatars” – characters that people on the live team can inhabit and walk around as. If virtual worlds are essentially theme parks, then these puppet avatars are the costumed characters, with the added advantage that they can actually chat with the players.

With puppet avatars, you might not see Spongebob in the game all the time, but those few times you did see him and got to ask him your burning question about the script error in episode #332, you would be RILED UP. It would be like catching Mickey and Minny smooching and hopping into a silver carriage in a scripted costumed character appearance at Disney World. i saw it happen there when i was seven, and i’ve never forgotten it.

Fifty Bazillion Kids CAN Be Wrong

To wrap up his presentation, the speaker used the same dodgy metrics that Viacom uses to paint the project in a better light. He talked about stats like the number of people who have signed up for an account or the number of rooms created in-world. In my opinion, the only stat that’s worth its salt in this case is “number of currently active players”. Active players can be people who have logged in in the past month, say. Active player stats really say something about the utility, stickiness and enduring appeal of your virtual world after the initial marketing push.

In other worlds, the total sign-ups might hold a little more water. But Viacom is pulling the digital wool over the media’s eyes because its existing membership base was rolled into the Nicktropolis membership system. That means that every kid who watched the immensely popular teevee station and signed up for member content was considered a Nicktropolis user, even if he signed up years before Nicktropolis was an ugly little gleam in a developer’s crusty left eye. That’s what i call dodgy marketing.

i also happen to know a little something something about the relationship between a teevee station and its support website. Basically, anything you launch on the site, if it’s supported on-air, will get far more plays than it might even deserve. i’ve seen numerous mediocre games launch on my former employer’s site, and the gameplay statistics come out rosy because a good portion of the on-air viewers decide to come and check it out. As game designers, we started to pay much closer attention to repeat plays when we analayzed whether a game was successful or not.

Sucktropolis

With Nicktropolis, Viacom and Nickelodeon are keeping the bar very low for online kid-targeted virtual worlds and MMOs. Kids don’t deserve the shovelware that their favourite brands feed them in the form of video games, from crummy licensed console titles to boxes of Krusty-Os with sharp metal sprockets inside them. In the face of the hype, the number-fudging and the self-congratulatory back-patting, i am declaring that this emporer has no clothes, and looks pretty rough in the nude to boot. In my opinion, Nicktropolis is a shameful, horrible waste of resources and a disservice to Nickelodeon’s once excellent online brand.

Further Reading

Over at his Clickable Culture blog, my fellow Canadian commentator Tony Walsh had the nuts to deride this steaming pile far more eloquently back when it launched:

‘Nicktropolis’ Fails on Many Levels

That Nicktropolis is a terrible product isn’t an industry secret. But why a respected conference like GDC would invite Chris Romero to showcase it is.

Untold Entertainment is, not surprisingly, in no way affiliated with Viacom or its subsidiaries. All images used under Canadian fair dealing review provisions.

Games and the Internet are ultimately perceived as a threat to mainstream media’s long-term profits and marketshare. Mainstream media doesn’t want you spending hours meeting friends and doing business in Second Life – they want you spending hours drooling at this season’s ‘reality’ TV shows.

i used to work for Canadian Big Media, where the reluctance to dive whole-hog into online ventures was palpable. The company was run by an old boys’ club of former teevee ad execs. i could daily hear the screams of the employees trapped in steerage class in the hull of the Good Ship Television, torn open leagues back by the Internet iceberg, and already on its rapid decline to a dark and watery grave. And there they were, the old media captains, proudly and pig-headedly manning Good Ship Television’s bridge, clinging to the metal carcass as it sank.

And the band played hail to the chief!

————————————

When you own and operate a Massively Mutliplayer Online Game you are, in very many ways, a day care worker. You’re trying to keep a group of players happy all day long. These players are all at different stages of development. Some learn faster than others. Some are well-behaved, while some draw on the walls and throw wood blocks at the other players.

The content you develop for your MMO costs you money. If your game is free to play with an enhanced subscription or micro-payment model, you need to structure your game to get the most mileage possible from your content. Your game’s structure determines how quickly players will use up your content. If your game is level-based, prepare to have a lot of cranky toddlers on your hands.

Many of the most popular MMOs today follow the levelling systems introduced by pen-and-paper role-playing games from the 1970s:

1. Your character has a statistical list of abilities
2. When you take actions, your score improves incrementally
3. Once your score hits a certain threshold, your character “levels up”
4. Levelling up improves your character’s stats
5. The score required to reach the next level gets larger
6. The more your character’s stats increase, the more of the game world you can experience

i have a few problems with this time-worn system. For starters, it’s time-worn. Just like any well-established genre, RPGs have sunk into distinct ruts. Levelling systems are a rut. Elemental (ice, fire, water, earth, lightining) magic systems are pretty tired too. A number of articles i’ve been reading lately wonder why so many MMOs and RPGs take place in traditional Tolkien-inspired fantasy worlds with orcs, trolls, ogres and elves. The same question was raised at the 2007 Game Developers’ Conference.

The obvious answer is that established products sell better than untried ones. Sequels and spin-offs thrive not only in the game industry, but also in teevee land and filmywood. It often takes a young, upstart company to prove a new concept for a huge publishing giant to sweep in, buy that company (or steal the idea) and make good on it!

I Have a -5 Bonus to Tolerance

The second trouble with levelling systems is that they are dumb. If my character’s stats are Strength, Intelligence and Dexterity, and i kill the same rat species 500 times, i will eventually level up. Why did my Strength stat increase? Probably because my character got so much exercise thwacking away with his sword. Why did my Dexterity stat increase? This one’s a bit of a stretch. Maybe my character became a better sword handler during all that hacking and slashing? Maybe he learned how to do some cool sword twirls while he mundanely murdered a mob of matching monsters?

Fine. But why on Earth did my character’s intelligence stat increase when he levelled up? Was he reading an encyclopedia while he was fighting? Was he listening to some sort of Books on Tape series that i wasn’t aware of? The total abstraction of abilities to numbers forces artificiality on the game experience, an experience that could be much more enriching.

Skills vs. Levels

Games like Oblivion are more skill-based than level-based, and i prefer them. Oblivion still has levels and thresholds, but players improve their skills by actually performing those skills. To improve your acrobatics skill, jump. To improve your stamina, run. To improve your intelligence, read a book. To improve your magic casting skill, cast magic. It’s a very logical approach to character growth, and it’s much more rewarding than abstracted box scores that turn gaming into an undergrad statistics course.

The danger of levelling is that your players are encouraged to eat through your content as fast as possible. There’s a definite competition between your players to see who can reach your level cap first. And when players do reach the level cap, they complain on your boards that there’s nothing to do! Massively is hosting an interesting discussion about the pleasures and pains of levelling up quickly in an MMO.

RPGs Play You

The comfort of RPGs is that they require very little skill of the human player. i don’t have to be physically strong in order to complete a RPG. If my character dies, i can jump back into the game and monotonously beat up weak creatures until the game decides i’m strong enough to tackle larger creatures. i don’t have to be genuinely charismatic to sway the opinions of in-game characters. i improve that number stat, and suddenly the game gives me extra conversation options to woo the different people i meet. i know that i won’t be able to complete a twitch-based game that requires fast reflexes, but i can always rely on RPGs to let me methodically chip away at the game content, plodding through randomly-regenerated monsters until i finish the game … not by my own skill, but by dull brute force.

Some MMOs shake this format up a little. In Puzzle Pirates, encounters really are twitch-based. The player who can zip through a game of Puzzle Fighter (aka “swordfighting”) the fastest wins the encounter.

But at the risk of sounding like John Lennon: imagine an MMO without levels. Imagine a game where only the smartest players solved the game’s puzzles and riddles. Only the fastest players could compete in twitch-based challenges. Only the most creative players earned praise and attention for their in-game designs. Only the most methodical players could keep track of complex game stats. Imagine an MMO that played to the strengths of the human beings backing each digital avatar, so that players really had to band together and use each other’s actual skills to succeed in the game. Then success would not be based on who could repeatedly click on the same monster for hours on end.

i don’t know what that MMOG looks like. But i’m working on it.

Update: One day after this post, an author at Massively wrote this pithy observation:

Killing a boss on launch day may mean you’re one of only a handful of people to do it – ever. The chance to actually be heroic, in a genre that more often than not defines heroism as ‘investing time’, is exciting.

The rest of the artice, titled “MMOG – missing a sense of mystery” is worth a read.

]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2007/11/27/hot-mmog-dev-tip-4-levels/feed/ 2 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2007/11/22/hot-mmog-dev-tip-3-wow/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2007/11/22/hot-mmog-dev-tip-3-wow/#comments Thu, 22 Nov 2007 16:06:32 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=43 i worked for over a year as sr. game developer on a massively multiplayer online casual game for kids and tweens called GalaXseeds. i learned a great deal, and am happy to share these tips about MMOG development.

World of Warcraft Cliff Notes

You may have heard of it?

Want to learn all about World of Warcraft, but don’t want to spend the time or money? It’s exactly like studying crack cocaine without actually having to smoke it. How Stuff Works has written a World of Warcraft primer to keep people in the know and free from addiction.

i’m taking the easy way out this week and simply linking to the article. Look for more articles from Untold Entertainment in this ongoing MMOG Tips series, geared for people who’d like to better understand MMOGs (particularly casual MMOGs, which exclude WoW entirely.)

]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2007/11/22/hot-mmog-dev-tip-3-wow/feed/ 0 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2007/11/20/islands-untold-a-minimally-multiplayer-online-game/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2007/11/20/islands-untold-a-minimally-multiplayer-online-game/#comments Tue, 20 Nov 2007 15:55:22 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=41 There’s an interesting but brief article at Massively titled “Could Smaller Be Better?”, asking whether the “massive” aspect of Massively Multiplayer Online Games takes some of the fun out of gaming.

Before this company existed, i entered the 2007 Vortex Game Competition. The competition turned out to be a disappointing event catering to students, and run by staff and friends of the incredibly dodgy International Academy of Design and Technology, a school about which i’ve heard stories to curl your hair. (i almost hesitate to link to them. Well – here it is in a nutshell: don’t go.)

The Vortex entry was called Islands Untold. It’s exactly the kind of small MMO the Massively article talks about. One of the posters there says:

To replicate this sort of experience MMO’s would have to forcibly seperate people and that just wouldn’t work out.

Au contraire! Islands Untold solves this problem by grouping players together on islands.

Here is the original game proposal for the competition:

Islands Untold

Hello? Where’re all the other players at?

Islands Untold is a casual multiplayer online game in which teams of five players co-operate to survive, settle, and defend a tiny tropical island. Every island is home to a Thinker, a Maker, a Worker, a Gatherer, and a Shaman. As each player brings a special skill to the island, success depends on teamwork and co-operation. Even so, some players may decide to backstab each other … even if it means angering the island god “the Big Pao”. As players research and create new tools and technology, they will be able to communicate with, and even invade, the thousands of other islands adrift in the endless uncharted seas.

Players will be excited to log into Islands Untold every day to feed their online avatar, much like a virtual pet. Fellow island dwellers will see logged-out players as though they are sleeping. While he is away from the game, a player’s team members might feed his avatar to keep him alive, or decide to murder him! The Big Pao keeps an account of all injustices, and will recincarnate players on different islands if they fall victim to a mutinous tribe.

Every day, a new random item will wash up on the shore of the island. This could be a common item or a rare one – players have to log in to find out! Along with the survival mechanic, the random crate reward is an excellent hook to encourage repeat gameplays.

Project Elements:

The game will utilize a Flash front-end and a PHP/mySQL solution for the backend. Communication between the two will be handled by SmartFox Server, a multiplayer gaming server built specifically for Flash.

Point of Difference:

Islands Untold will appeal to casual online gamers who claim they have no time to play games, yet end up playing as often as so-called hardcore gamers. The game’s depth and complexity will there for players who want a more enriching experience, but to new players, Islands Untold will seem a fun, survival-themed Tamagotchi game.

This game is unique in that it is technically a massively multiplayer online game, except that the potentially thousands of players are grouped together in teams of five on isolated islands. This has the dual effect of speeding up messaging between players, and focussing on co-operation before competition. Since co-operative play is often cited as an appealing element to female gamers, Islands Untold will have a broad consumer reach.

Regular content updates will be supported by micropayments.

<< end submission >>

The judges didn’t show me much love because i didn’t discuss financials, a required component of the competition. (i may have had a more complete presentation, but the organizers confirmed my entry two business days before the event!) The judges also figured i “didn’t need the help”, because i was gainfully employed at a Canadian media conglomorate.

Little did they know that within a few short months, i would leave my company and resort to scrounging for improvised loin cloths in city dumpsters to keep my body warm in the ensuing winter.

]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2007/11/20/islands-untold-a-minimally-multiplayer-online-game/feed/ 2 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2007/11/13/mmog-vanity-pets/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2007/11/13/mmog-vanity-pets/#comments Tue, 13 Nov 2007 21:12:12 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=37 Time Well Wasted has an interesting run-down of “vanity pets” in various massively multiplayer games. These are pets that don’t help in combat, and don’t do anything else remotely useful.

The author makes his strongest case for these pets when he talks about rarity. This Untold Entertainment article about MMOG rewards talks about building aspirational rewards; that is, rewards that very few players will experience for themselves, but act as the proverbial carrot on a stick to keep people playing. There’s no better example of this than the WoOW firefly pet mentioned in the article above.

]]> http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2007/11/13/mmog-vanity-pets/feed/ 0 http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2007/10/18/hot-mmog-dev-tip-2/ http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/2007/10/18/hot-mmog-dev-tip-2/#comments Thu, 18 Oct 2007 16:41:15 +0000 Ryan Henson Creighton http://untoldentertainment.com/blog/?p=22 i worked for over a year as sr. game developer on a massively multiplayer online casual game for kids and tweens called GalaXseeds. i learned a great deal, and am happy to share these tips about MMOG development.

Tip #2 – Reward

One of the key elements of good game design is the principal of risk vs. reward. Every time your player risks something, he gets a reward. The quality of the reward should be proportional to the degree of risk. If the player risks losing a health point by fighting an enemy, the defeated enemy could drop additional ammo, coins, or health. If the player risks losing an entire life by battling his way through a level, the reward for completing the level could be a new weapon, extra lives, or a new story segment. This is nothing new – if you’ve played a few games in your life, you’ve cottoned on to this principle.

Every challenge you set up in your MMOG should be rewarded. If you have too many unrewarded challenges, your players might see your game as a waste of time and will move on to something more fulfilling. Gone are the days when players can play a game, and are rewarded by the simple joy of playing. Virtual capitalism has run amok in the MMOG space; assuming you’re developing a game that falls in line with its competition, you’ll have to reward your players for every task, big or small.

Launch day is too late to start thinking about your maintenance plan and the rewards you’ll offer. The structure you plan for and build from day one will determine how often and how richly you can reward your players. The better your reward structure, the more addictive and exciting your game will be.

1. The fastest reward you can develop will overrun your game.

This is a very easy trap to fall into. When your product is live, and you have a finite maintenance budget and a limited production schedule, you will gravitate toward whatever is easiest to build or implement. Before long, your game will become overrun with that one reward type.

In the Sitekick Project, an online collectible loyalty program/game hybrid i designed for YTV.com, players own a little yellow robot. The robot runs on Chips, which are programs that can be discovered and collected throughout the site.

Chips can do many amazing things! Some Chips change your robot’s appearance – you can dress up your bot with different hairstyles and costume pieces. Some Chips contain MP3s that you can listen to using a music player Chip. Some Chips change your robot’s environment, while others launch or contain mini-games. One Chip lets the user print out a customizable cut-and-glue 3D paper model of a race car.

Obviously, the fastest, easiest Chips to develop were the “Face Pieces” – the paper doll Chips. Extra functionality takes extra time, so it’s very easy to just sit and bang out a series of Chips that are essentially still images. Since these were the fastest, least costly rewards to produce, they soon became the only Chips that were produced.

You can look at the encylopedic “Chipendium” to see this … most of the interactive or animated Chips appear early in the list. As the project went on, paper doll Chips become more and more prevalent, until they entirely take over.

The result is that the application became the reward type. With nothing but paper doll elements being produced, Sitekick has become a paper doll application. As such, it’s quite popular. Paper doll apps do very well online. Most MMOGs avatar systems are essentially paper doll apps. But now that the majority of the 500+ Sitekick Chips are paper doll pieces, it seems odd to have that handful of functional Chips. From a player’s perspective, they feel like they belong to an unsupported feature.

So make lean rewards!

When designing your MMOG, maintain a strict bottom line cost for your reward development. Try to get the development time and cost per reward as low as possible through shared code libraries, a streamlined production process, and fast, easy-to-use admin tools.

2. Commit to Supporting Your Feature Set

In your maintenance plan, commit to developing x number of “easy” rewards, and y number of rewards that are more costly to develop. Bite the bullet on that one! There’s no sense in developing a reward feature that you will never support because its rewards are too expensive or time-consuming to build. Eventually, players will start wondering why there’s a pet shop with only one kind of pet in it, or why there’s a crafting system that always produces the same three swords.

3. Structure your rewards around numbers.

The simplest way to reward your player is to make a number go up or down. In GalaXseeds, players can be rewarded with (among other things) money, XP and Level numbers. Numbers go up, numbers go down. Easy. Your software handles this “reward generation” for you. You can even link number rewards together. When you level up in GalaXseeds (number goes up), your inventory capacity increases (number goes up). Countless RPGs have blazed this trail – many of them amount to nothing more than baseball box scores with a graphics overlay. Kill a monster for more experience (number goes up). Gain a level (number goes up) to improve your Strength stat (number goes up).

The more items and features you design around numbers, the more quickly, easily and abundantly you can reward your players. GalaXseeds has a few different item types – among them are Gear (furniture) and Get-Ups (costumes). Developing an item is obviously more costly and time-consuming than allowing your game to dynamically tweak numbers up and down. But you can wrap a costly reward in numbers to get more bang for your buck.

Sure, you have a fridge … but do you have a level two fridge (number goes up) that can hold three more pieces of food (number goes up)? How many style points does your bowtie have? (number goes up)

Then, just design a mini-game or activity to tweak those item numbers up and down (furniture battle? i dunno:). There you have it. Lots more gameplay, lots more reward … much less maintenance work.

You can even tie simple programming mechanics into this reward system. Maybe you give your player a telescope. When the player looks through it, he sees an empty starfield. But the more games he plays/trades he makes/things he buys etc, the more random stars appear in that starfield. This solution is simple, it’s programmatic, and your artist just has to draw one simple star.

3. Overdoing one reward devalues it.

While it’s easiest to tweak numbers up and down, be careful not to lean on this too heavily, and be careful to go easy on your in-game economy. If you keep giving players money with nothing to spend it on, money as a reward will be devalued. No one will want money any more. And once your player stops desiring your reward, there’s no incentive to play, and all but your most loyal fans will move on to a new game.

This goes beyond money. If you keep giving players the same item – the Golden Whatsit – no one will want a Golden Whatsit any more. If you keep increasing a player’s level, and there’s no power or privilege associated with higher levels, players won’t care. It becomes a meaningless stat with no inherent value, like score. One type of gamer is highly motivated by seeing his “score” number (money number, level number, etc) go up and up and up. The rest of us are after something more meaningful.

4. Create aspirational rewards.

One of the rewards in GalaXseeds is room access. Reach level x, and you can enter Area Y. Accessing a new area may not be a compelling enough reward. It’s not enough for players to simply visit a new area. They had to do something there. As GalaXseeds progressed, more and more content was added to these special access areas.

This makes sense. There’s this whole idea of functional vs. fashionable items. In some cases, having a non-functional hat is enough of a reward. Being able to visit Area Y isn’t a compelling reward because there’s no way to “wear” Area Y … you can’t take it around with you or brag about being able to go there. To solve this, you could put a special item in the Area Y that only players who went there are able to wear. That way, they can parade their success and privilege in front of the other players, inspiring those players to pursue the same reward. GalaXseeds does this with its monthly parties. Club Penguin does this with its visiting pirate. Puzzle Pirates puts rare resources on different islands that only more experienced players can access.

You have to do some soul-searching when it comes to developing aspirational rewards (just as you have to commit to developing more time-consuming and costly rewards to support your feature set, even though the temptation is to just bang out the quick content.) The challenge when you develop level 70 Happy Pants is that most of your players are at level 1, so you’ve just spent time and money on content that most players won’t experience. But if you DON’T develop level 70 Happy Pants, there will be no reward for your level 70 players. They’ll feel that your game was a waste of time, and they’ll leave angry. And the level 1 players will have nothing to strive for. They’ll think “what’s the point of levelling up?” Suddenly, your whole levelling feature is a wash.

World of Warcraft handles aspirational rewards very well by ensuring that the experience at its maximum level is exciting and rewarding, and it’s different depending on your character type. The result is that there are many players reaching the top level and then, instead of leaving the game because there’s nothing left to do, they choose a different character type and start all over again. That’s the kind of player commitment MMOGs should strive to foster.

i’m a huge advocate for aspirational rewards – game content you can’t experience until later – for its sheer stickiness. These are some key factors to making aspirational rewards work:

a. Your players have to be able to showcase, flaunt, or brag about an aspirational reward. How are you going to know that you want the +99 Sword of Ass-kicking unless you see a level 70 parading through the town square with it?

b. Aspirational rewards have to appear attainable. If i get the sense that i’m going to lose 90 hours of my life trying to get that Sword of Asskicking, i might move on to something else. If there’s some glimmer of hope that i could get that sword – me, a brand new bright-eyed player – i might give it a shot.

c. Players must know the path to the reward. Microsoft released a game called Viva Pinata that messed this one up.

Their game is all about collecting pinatas. As with Pokémon, the game gives players a blank encyclopedia (do this in your game!!), providing players with some idea of which pinatas players are missing. At no point did the game drop a hint has to how players could collect certain pinatas – they left that up to the extra $40 game guide, i suppose. i stopped playing that game after checking a cheat site. In order to earn one of these special pinatas, i had to use a certain tool on a certain object on a certain frame of animation. In a game with many tools and hundreds of objects with thousands of frames of animation, this was too much to bear. There was no way i could discover these pinatas on my own, fair and square. If the only way for me to complete the game was to cheat, i was ready for a new game.

5. Find clever ways to reuse rewards.

Japanese role playing game designers figured this one out quickly. Their games were huge, but cartridge memory was small, so the enemies in the back half of the game were just repainted versions of enemies you fought earlier. Green slimes? That’s so first level. Powered-up players battle golden slimes!

They used the same technique of tweaking number values. Crank up a green slime’s attack, defense, and hitpoints. Then paint the sprite yellow and change its name. Voila – the golden slime is born.

i, for one, hate battling golden slimes. What a chincy way to add enemies to your game.

But furniture? Bring it on! If i can get a blue couch to match my blue dresser, and the colour “blue” isn’t available in the GalaXseeds paint shop, i’m a happy player. It’s a very easy reward to set up, and somehow repainted furniture doesn’t seem as chincy an addition to your game as repainted enemies. Ditto Pokémon. i knew that if i searched long and hard enough, i could find colour variants in the game’s creatures. No special abilities – i would just have a blue Pikachu. And i could show off my blue Pikachu to other players via the “trade” and “online battle” features. Rewarding.

6. Start building items now, and don’t stop until your graphics guy dies.

My final tip is this: of all the rewards you can muster, items will likely be the most ubiquitous, and therefore the most needed. And of all the items you can create, functional items will trump vanity items. Players don’t just want the pointy hat – they want the pointy hat that enables them to fly.

Plan ahead now to get your item development flow as tight and speedy as possible. Then start churning out items. Create a massive stockpile of items. Pile items to the virtual ceiling. You will always, always, always need items. Better still, create a crafting system whereby players can create their own items.

Give your players a book or catalog or encyclopedia to keep track of which items are in the game. The bigger the list, the more exciting your game will be and the longer people will hang around trying to collect all the items. (See: Sitekick Chipendium, Club Penguin Catalogs, Pokémon Pokédex, etc)

Reward items with more items. If your player collects all of the superhero costume pieces, reward him with a special additional mask or cape.

Do these things, and thy game shall be awesome.

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