Less Grind, More Story

It's because my Night Elf Thistletoes has stalled in the mid-40s in Stranglethorn Vale that I can heartily agree with Richard Garriot, who commented in his keynote at the Develop Conference, "The obsession with damage inflicted over time as the mechanic behind combat reduces games to data management... The fact that people use the nomenclature 'grinding' to describe what they do in online games is a bad sign. Missions have been reduced to taking the next pellet from the slot machine."

And you know, reports are that Tabula Rasa is not looking that bad. And it sounds like - with the targeting system and the reduced HUD - that they are going for a more mainstream, less MO-focused audience. More actiony, perhaps, than usual for an MMO.

I also like that it's NOT MEDIEVAL FANTASY. Seriously. I am, yes, a dork, but I've spent too many hours messing about with trolls and elves now and at this point I'm ready to leave them behind. So the former Lord British's transformation to General British (will he turn his castle into a giant alien ship?) suits me just fine.

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Clay Calls "Bullshit" on Second Life

Clay Shirky demands to see Second Life's hand in a recent article on Valleywag that calls bullshit on the virtual environment's numbers - and the crazy press coverage it's been getting lately.

I've always said there was something over the top about the whole Second life thing. I know it's a media darling right now, but how many people actually play it? And for how long?

When Clay writes, "I have been watching the press reaction to Second Life with increasing confusion" he mirrors my reaction. With every huge article in Businessweek the hype tree grew taller and bore ever more verdant leaves, seeding other articles in other publications. (I don't mean to call out Businessweek except that they published the most outrageous "Virtual Millionaire" article recently.) And while, yes, money in virtual economies is real, as Julian and Ted Catronova have shown (among others), how real is the money in a good if you hold all the goods yourself? It's only worth as much as others will pay for it and frankly, I'm just not sure that a userbase exists that *will* pay, collectively, a million bucks for virtual real estate.

I respect what Second Life is, and I think some of the press is well-deserved. It is a concrete way to imagine what we used to call cyber-space. I just don't think there's anything close to a mass movement represented by its users - just really interesting new ideas.

Firefly MMO

I love my boyfriend, but he knows that if Joss Whedon showed up at my doorstep bearing flowers...you know. I love Joss Whedon. I love his work. I love his attitude. I love what he says about art and women and his work. I think Firefly was amazing - even better than Battlestar Galactica (which I also love, of course. But it doesn't have the Joss Whedon touch.)

So I can't help being a little excited at the idea of an MMO set in the world of Firefly. I've had dreams about me and Zoe riding horses alongside spaceships along dusty canyons. I want to be excited about it! I want to believe that it will be like KOTOR, but MMO. That it would rule.

But I'm just not sure. Multiverse is new technology and as far as I know, no products using it have launched yet. So, we'll see.

But I can dream!

Epic - and I Mean EPIC - Raid

The Penny Arcade Alliance launched a multi-guild co-ordinated raid last night that simultaneously attacked all three Horde cities on the Dark Iron server.

Kind of gives new meaning to "wow" doesn't it? Because all I can say is....wow.

More at azeroth.metroblogs.

(Thanks, Eric!)

From the PR Wire This Morning

Some interesting developments off the wires this morning.

Cartoon Network Announces MMO - in partnership with Korean MMO developer Grigon. Grigon's most well-known work is a game called Seal Online. The game will be aimed at kids and will incorporate Cartoon Network characters. Hm, okay. Well, if Toontown can do it, why not?

Absolute Poker Launches Poker Site for Women - called AP Lady. Don't click anything on the site, it'll trigger a download. What makes it different from regular poker? Well, apparently women aren't good at poker and this special site "is exploring partnerships with other relevant women's groups that will help to achieve the site's mission of helping women who want to get better at poker." Okay.

Women in Games International Conference Hosted By Microsoft - was announced today. The conference will happen on September 16th at Microsoft in Redmond, WA. Bonnie Ross, Director of Product Development for Microsoft Game Studios, will give the keynote address. The main topic addressed by the panels will be quality of life issues. I'm not sure I'll be able to attend, as it's a bit close to Tokyo Game Show, but I hope so.

The Hot New MMO

Consider it retro MMO, and a bit light on the RPG.

MMO Pong, baby.

Short of an economy and crafting classes, this thing has everything an MMO needs to be successful:

1). PvP
2). Factions (Blue paddles forever!!!1)
3). Griefers

I think we need to start a guild here. Who's with me?

Gays, Lesbians, and Their Guilds

The recent scuffle between Blizzard and a young woman who wanted to create a gay-and-lesbian-friendly guild made me almost as depressed as when San Francisco started revoking marriage licenses it had just issued to blissfully newly-wed couples.

The truth is, I would like to find a gay-lesbian friendly guild. If they would have me, although I am neither.

Let's face it, straight boys in anonymous games are annoying. If you play a female character - or if they even *think* for a moment that you're female, some gamers get all goggly-eyed. "A/S/L? Lol". Sure, it's nice to get free gold and stuff from the remnants of a chivalric instinct, but all that attention can get a little tiring. And then there are the heavy-duty role-player types who are constantly "Milady" this and "Milady" that and who are bowing and scraping and acting like proper goofballs instead of focusing on the damn raid.

I'd rather be flirted with by gay boys and lesbians, quite honestly.

Plus, gay boys and men are more likely to be supportive of you. A shoulder to cry on. Every straight girl should have a gay boyfriend, to dispense much-needed hair, fashion, and love advice without a trace of competitiveness. Lesbians are also very supportive, although I've definitely run into a few who are more aggressive than straight boys!

Raiding with your Gay-Lesbian Guild would be so much more fun. Hugs all around afterwards!

And the added bonus would be to not hear the names which so many gamers liberally sprinkle into their speech, because honestly, I'm just tired of it.

I do hope they'll accept me. I'm bi-curious, does that count?

Publishing For the People: Tringo Goes to GBA

Clickable Culture is reporting that Tringo, a portmanteau of a game that plays like a cross between Tetris and Bingo will be making its way to GBA screens soon. Tringo was originally created by players within Second Life, the graphical MUD/game/thing run by Linden Labs.

We've seen Popcap games make the jump to GBA before, but this is probably the first time that user-created content for a MMO has been licensed for its own game. I think that's pretty neat.

China bars minors from violent MMOs

Game Insider reports an Interfax China article reading that China's Ministry of Culture has just moved to ban minors from playing any massively multiplayer online game that allows for player-killing (PK).

The statement reads, in part:

"Online games that have PK content usually also contain acts of violence and leads to players spending too much time trying to increase the power of their characters. They are harmful to young people."

Kind of reminds me of my childhood when mom would say, "You've been playing those games too long... why don't you go outside?" Only, you know, reinforced by Chinese police.

I think we can be pretty sure that this is going to change the way that Asian MMOs are made, since almost all of them currently contain large amounts of PvP content.

China-Japan Conflict Stakes out Virtual Territory

Interesting speculation at Terra Nova: "I get an uneasy feeling when actual conflict spills over into games of conflict. But I’m not sure why. Maybe it -would- be a good idea if opposing sides took up virtual arms – anything is better than stones and bombs. For example, one might argue that the current India vs Pakistan test series is a cathartic political statement, the leaders of both nations being present seems to suggest that that game does have political significance. Or am I just trivializing matters now? After all, war’s not a game now is it?"

This brings briefly to mind Kuma/War, which lets players experience levels baed on real U.S. missions in Iraq, ot its Arab-world counterpart, UnderAsh.

Virtual cultural colonization?

City of Copies: Marvel vs. NC Soft

In the off chance that you’ve been asleep for the past month and haven’t wandered across the large expanse of the gaming internet, you might not know that Marvel is suing NC Soft over copyright infringement.

The gist of it is that basically, NC Soft is infringing on Marvel’s characters with its game City of Heroes. It’s not just that you can build heroes in CoH, it’s that you can build Marvel heroes, or at least close facsimiles to Marvel characters. I would imagine for this case to hold any weight, Marvel is going to have to prove somehow that NC Soft made some money off of Marvel characters, by allowing people to create or use said characters.

In the interest of trying to see what all of the fuss is about, I purchased a copy of the game, installed it (five hours, thanks for asking), and the next day began creating Marvel characters... MORE...

MMOGs = Crippled.Nets

Nearly all Massively Multiplayer Games have servers - versions of the game running in parallel. The entire population of the game is broken up into more manageable chunks; instead of 15,000 players in one zone, you have 1,500 players average in each of 10 zones. Each of those zones is a complete version of the game, self-contained worlds; there's no communication or exchange between the various versions.

This just sucks.

I went back to play more City of Heroes after hearing Eddo Stern speak of his CoH addiction and hijinks there. I had a character on his server Protector; I've been on a few times in the last week now (mostly playing on my PC desktop during times when my Mac laptop is compressing video). I'm hanging out online, seeing if Eddo logs on. But I have characters and friends on other servers! If the core dynamic of MMOGs is social play, then having to choose a neighborhood to hang out in is a perfectly flawed version of the bodyless cyberspace.

Email works between any internet-connected computer and any other. And yet I log into some state of the art MMOG and I can't send an in-game message to a friend on another server? Let alone join them on an adventure, unless we each chose the same game server when we were ripping open our software boxes and logging on to the game for the first time.

I understand this has to be about server load issues, about population management, about providing a good game experience to users. I'm sure there's an essay out there about how a single-server MMOG might (or might not) be possible - that's what I'm fishing for with this post - some signs of hope that I'll be able to play with everyone who is playing the same game I am online!

A Fitting Memorial

Stories like this from Gamespot bring a tear to my eye.

Critics and players alike often criticize the structure and attitude of many MMOGs, but sometimes the sheer amount of people with a shared interest can create a meaningful event.

Thanks folks, even if by just proving we're a group of decent human beings.

The Desktop Confessional

The cleverly named Everquest Daily Grind is a blog that collects the stories of those who live with Everquest addicts. Interestingly, sitemaster "J" eschews the sensationalistic stories of cheating partners and criminal activity for the simple day-to-day drama that comes with addiction. The result is a collection of sometimes-touching-sometimes-disturbing tales emailed from across the English-speaking world.

"I've tried tricking myself into letting my own baggage about the game go, for instance by pretending to myself that he's a Ph.D. candidate, say, or a medical student who needs to study all the time and thus cannot fairly be expected to do his share of cooking, shopping, or cleaning. I find myself hoping against hope that I'm not simply being used (allowing myself to be used), and that our friendship is in fact one-sided and wonderfully convenient for him."

I am of the opinion that there are basically two things worth doing in life, cultivating joy and cultivating hope, and this belief has lead me to my current occupation as a game designer at Electronic Arts. Indeed, I tend to marginalize reports of negative effects of gaming as being the result of ignorant mass-media and politicians. Perhaps that is what makes these stories as powerful as they are: pedestrian accounts of ordinary people presented plainly and anonymously. As much as I (and GGA in general) tend to focus on the best parts of gamer culture, it is worth occasionally reminding oneself that sometimes even good things can lead to bad ends.

Children of Heroes - Avatar Aesthetics

Posting photos of your online MMOG characters is kinda like showing people baby pictures maybe? There's a measure of pride, and definite investment. After seeing Professor Burke's post on City of Heroes from last month, with a picture of his own character Faust, I was inspired to foist these photos on you folks.

As I wrote in my first GGA post on City of Heroes, I was laughing and chortling and enjoying myself immensely designing my characters for this game. I like to experiment with different character types in MMOGs so I end up with a number of lower-level characters. This is fun in CoH because I get a chance to develop my character-making technique, to improve my avatar aesthetics.

	Phyrric - Technology Blaster Virtue Server My first character - let's make him look like a gleeful idiot! I thought - Phyrric, a victory that defeats. And it looks like fire - many of the powers in City of Heroes are based around the elements, so making a fire character was easy. And making him look silly, like a winner who has lost his marbles, was easy too - wide grin, silly glasses, tall hair, lines on his chest, non-sequitor radiation symbol on his chest, pink fingerless gloves, flaming metal jodhpurs, boots with fins. Then I found out I'd mispelled Phyrric (I used Google as my spellchecker) and I felt even better about the whole thing.
	Delphine - Mutant Controller Pinnacle Server You ever notice: in many role-playing games, men are the brutes and women are the enchantresses? I didn't exactly break form here - I wanted to make a more magic-type of character, and play with playing a woman. City of Heroes offers three gender choices - male, female, and giant brutish male. And astonishingly, the fashion choices for women are rather limited if you don't want her to be wearing a bikini or bustier. I was working on a mutant controller - someone who can manipulate gravity and energy to help friends and hurt foes. Powers of the mind, unknown, perhaps erratic - like the Oracle at Delphi! Delphine was her name then. Playing on this idea of someone from the Mediterranean, near the middle of the old world, I outfitted her in a mix of dark, formal Western business attire and the closest I could get to a muslim head scarf, or shadour. Beneath that, glowing eyes and a beaming third eye. Subdued pink and black colors, with just some superhero freak freak happening in her legs.
	Maggma - Magic Tanker Protector Server A friend was on Protector - I wanted a character on that server. And I wanted to play one of the thick characters that could charge into combat without fretting hit points so much. The brutish male gender-type was a natural for this style of play, and the chracter class "Tanker." It would be differently fun to play a tiny shrimpy person who was a tanker, yes, and a brutish male healer maybe. But this was not the image I had in my mind. I wanted something earthy thick and powerful. I was playing with the different effects in the character designer, the tattoos and art you could inscribe on your hero, and I found this electricity effect on his shoulders might look like lava if you colored the lines orange on a brown body. So I created this idea of a volcanic force - power of rock, power of fire. Born of unspoken magic, that's why he has those goofy glyphs on his pants, and celtic boots. I wanted him to have bare feet, but that's not an option here yet. Magic horns on his head. Deep earth tones with orange accents. This is my latest character, and probably my favorite to look at.

Part of the fun of City of Heroes is playing through these character creation choices from an aethetic point of view. Not - I'm a sneaky archer who can make robes. But I'm a volcano-inspired creature of magic who wears earth-tones. It's an important evolution in these kinds of games to be able to approach character creation from the outset as an aesthetic experience. Accordingly, the gameplay is filled with people expressing themselves, using the City of Heroes toolset to make some kind of personal statement on heroism, play and identity.

Here's a screenshot of Delphine standing with a fellow adventurer named Messiahnator, who fights with a large gun, yelling "bless you my children" as he shoots people down:

As expansive as the City of Heroes toolset seems after Dark Age of Camelot, for example, it's still nowhere near as fun as Second Life. But the gameplay here is different - City of Heroes players are in a much more structured environment. As the medium of massively multiplayer online games evolves, these tools for personalization and avatar customization should continue to expand to allow for more play. And that's fun!

Hero of One

Phyrric is facing down another small batch of Hellions gangmembers, the Fallen Buckshot. Wielding fists of fire, he blasts and rings the evildoers with flames. Finally, the foes fall to the grass, legs splayed, severely toasted.

Hurrah! Atlas City is safer! Until the respawn.

At E3 earlier this month, someone handed me a copy of City of Heroes, a super-hero based MMOG from NCSoft in the US. I hadn't planned on paying much attention to the game - I have a lot to do, articles to write, moving to Los Angeles this summer. But it's a holiday, and I decided to install it and check it out. A friend saw me, "Oh," he chortled, "you're playing the widow maker!"

My impressions from the first few days of play follow.

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On Meeting My 100% Perfect Game One Fine April Morning

Lately I've been, well... distracted.

It's... well, you see, there's this game. She, well, she's not from around here, you know? Only knows a few words of English, and even those are spoken with a heavy accent. I met her at work. Part of a longer assignment, really. The boss figured that since I knew a little of her native tongue that I was the guy to work with her. Get her oriented, you know? Establish some common grounds and open up the communication. Normally I'm good about not mixing my business and personal life. "Don't dip your pen in the company ink," right?

Yeah. Well, anyway...

It's not that she's particularly beautiful. Still, there's something about her that makes her beautiful in a way that World of Warcraft and EverQuest 2 could never be. Maybe you'd call it "quirky." Or "cute." Cute like a pile of kittens is cute. No, not like Puzzle Pirates. I don't know, maybe it's something about how her eyes render, or her musical score (which, I note, is pleasantly ample for her type of game) or her shader. She has a 'toon shader, which is the sort of thing that some guys will tell you just makes a game ugly, just like that. I've never felt that way, although if pressed I'd have to admit I couldn't tell you why.

If you explain why a game is beautiful, it sounds like you have a fetish. Strange, isn't it?

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The Metaverse on NPR

Great show on Massively Multiplayer Games ("Politics of Alphaville") on NPR with some very smart people: Henry Jenkins, Ted Castronova - as well-reasoned and well-spoken as ever - and the perennial rebel Julian Dibbell.

The dialogue is pretty basic for most of us, but it's a start. And it's always great to listen to Henry, Ted, and Julian. Ted especially stood out as an advocate for the value of online games, not just in monetary terms (as you know, he's an economist) but also in the social ones. Ted, you're my hero. And Julian, you know I think you're the cat's pajamas.

I'm glad interest in gaming is reaching the rather stodgy offices of NPR! (No offense to the fine people who program the station - NPR is the only station I listen to.)

Fainaru! Fantashii! Raunch!

I can't remember exactly where I heard it the first time, but Monday, March 22nd, The Playstation Store at the Metreon in San Francisco was going to have a party to celebrate the release of Final Fantasy XI (the MMO one) for Playstation 2 from 8 PM until 2 AM the next day, with the PS2 Harddrive with FFXI preloaded going on sale at precisely 12:01 AM. And there was going to be a costume contest. Thus it was that I went straight from work to spend approximately forever sitting on trains to get to the Metreon, camera in hand, to see (and record) what there was to see.

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stick a lightsaber in it

Professor Timothy Burke is a pop culture historian and eager gamer. An early player of the highly-touted Star Wars Galaxies, he wrote several pieces exploring the contours of the game in its fetal stages. I played with him, and I linked to his pieces from GGA.

Months later, the game seems to have grown up, and grown ugly. Burke has written a sort of player's postmortem, explaining why he cancelled his account, and trying to reason out what went wrong:

The major research question posed to me by Star Wars: Galaxies is no longer about virtual economies, emergent systems, or anything similar. The question is how a massively-multiplayer game that has the rights to the single most popular licensed property of the late 20th Century, the backing of a company with deep pockets, and a dream team of developers can end up being in the absolute best estimation no better than any other game of its kind, and by many accounts, including my own, among the worst.

The Mystery of SWG is good reading for anyone who follows this type of game. Burke writes, "I still believe that MMOGs have enormous potential to be fun and engaging, and I believe they remain the best place to realize the more profound artistic, cultural and social possibilities of computer games as a whole." I agree, though I'm increasingly saddened that those MMOGs touted as reaching into the mainstream fail in this regard (The Sims Online, and now Star Wars). None of my borderline gamer friends picked them up, and I soon stopped playing both of them. I have fonder memories of more hard-core games like Dark Age of Camelot, where the goals and systems for reaching them are more clear. MMOG game designers have not yet understood how to make participating in a persistent world a pleasant and playful way to spend a few months. I don't think it involves hours of repetative of clicking to make gun barrels.

A sizeable number of people will probably continue playing this prematurely-released game. But not breakthrough numbers, not too many people who have never played a multiplayer online game before. The real innovation in multiplayer seems ever-more likely to emerge from unlauded corners, unburdened by big licenses, fast schedules and huge teams. Note: that doesn't mean I won't try Grand Theft Tolkien online, during opening week.

Hattricky

From Sir Bruce's chart to the headlines in game magazines, the biggest attention for collaborative online play goes to graphical role-playing games like EverQuest and Lineage, with some attention left over for CounterStrike and Starcraft.

Hattrick is an online soccer game with over 160,000 active players, mostly across Europe. Through a web browser, players manage team rosters and training amidst an active market for football talent. Matches happen a few times a week, but gamers don't control the in-game action - the outcome of the game is determined by the statistics established through player management.

Web-based fantasy sports have been some of the most successful online game types for 'net portals like Yahoo. Still I was surprised here since so many people play and this game has never crossed my radar. It's possible to be a fluent, active electronic gamer and miss entire genres and active gaming communities; Hattrick hasn't received much US press since it's about soccer and it's got no graphics.

Gameplay appears to be a texty mix of Outlook and fantasy Ebay stuffed in a web browser. A giant active market place where your results are tested in the arena of simulated sports. Hattrick has grown since its release 6 years ago; now I imagine there are some players who are more excited by the people they're playing with, or the chance to design their own team. Still others see themselves as expert scouts for under-appreciated talent, picking computer players to groom and set out on the field. Maybe some players are invested in the competition, on a local and then national level - the game was designed in Sweden so they are the country to beat in this e-cup.

It's astonishing to see the amount of detail possible when you harnass computers to track variables for shared fantasy. "Fantasy" is used to describe worlds suffused with magic; in this case, fantasy is simply the chance to act in something not real. But "Play Money" calls that into question - if the virtual marketplace of Hattrick achieves enough value, gamers might trade accounts or team members for cash. Finding real-world economic value in a game world like this one is an easy way to argue that the game has high stakes; stakes higher than the word "fantasy" might connote.

Even without the real economic stakes, the hundreds of thousands of virtual managers and coaches active on Hattrick are fascinating: members of the tribe of people exercising their minds in collaborative electronic simulation. What are they making? What are they learning?

Hattrick is a massively-multiplayer online soccer/football game playable through a web browser at Hattrick.org; sign-ups are free.

Sir Bruce Version 6.0

Sir Bruce (Bruce Sterling Woodcock) is the most reliable source of readily available population statistics for Massively-Multiplayer Online Games in the United States.

Fortunately, he's continued his unbiased updates. He doesn't judge the games, he only judges the availablilty of population statistics. This latest update adds Star Wars Galaxies, Shadowbane, and Ragnarok Online from Japan. There's some somewhat promising numbers out there, maybe the core audience for MMOGs is growing.

Bruce's research is transparent; he explains his sources, and he even provides a copy of his basic Excel spreadsheet for download. What a good netizen!

An Analysis of MMOG Subscription Growth - updated for July 2003.

Not Yet you Fools!

For this month's feature, we're honored to have Richard A. Bartle's thoughts on voice communication in multiplayer online games.

Not Yet, you Fools!

By Richard A. Bartle

When I first heard that the X-Box would support real-time voice communication between players, my heart sank. It didn't sink because the effect it would have on X-Box games; it sank because of the effect it would inevitably have on virtual worlds.

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Galaxies Auctions - It Has Already Begun

Pehaps you can measure the popularity of an MMOG based on its auction potential. Only days after its late-June 2003 launch, users harvested Star Wars Galaxies for real-world resources: Ebay: Items matching ( galaxies ) and Player Auctions. Most of the auctions are for credits (20k credits on Bria server, etc). Some are for buildings, or accounts.

Browsing the Ebay completed SWG auctions, you can get an early sense of the market value for credits, items and characters. Below is just a sample of some of the more expensive and representative auctions; all auctions listed belowhad only one bid, unless otherwise noted:

10 July - Star Wars Galaxies 500,000 Credits Flurry - $550.00

13 July - Star Wars Galaxies 500,000 Credits Chilastra - $350.00 (12 bids)

12 July - SWG Star Wars Galaxies ST Armor Chilastra - $260.00 (18 bids)

30 June - Star Wars Galaxies Game Weaponsmith Starsider - $250.00

14 July - Star Wars Galaxies Alot Of work On Acount SWG - $197.00 (11 bids)

29 June - Star Wars Galaxies Starsider 50,000 Credits - $125.00

2 July - Starsider Star Wars Galaxies Corellia House - $75.00 (3 bids)

30 June - SWG Starwars Galaxies Bria - 50,000 Credits - $20.49 (2 bids)

29 June - SWG Star Wars Galaxies 5000 credits ANY Shard - $19.95

Star Wars Galaxies features a robust in-game auction system, which should help with the redistribution of powerful items. These early EBay auctions show there is still the desire to get ahead in the game with money instead of time, and some players are happy to trade their hours in the game for cash. Perhaps there will be a glut?

Or a crackdown - Star Wars Galaxies is a product of Sony/Verant, the same company behind EverQuest. They banned EBay auctions for in-game characters and items, based on an intellectual property claim. Somehow, PlayerAuctions.com continues brokering EverQuest goods for real-world dollars, perhaps through their own IP legal language. Some of the early Star Wars auctions contain language designed to avoid intellectual property claims against the item sales. It will be interesting to see if Verant/Sony mounts a legal claim against ongoing SWG auctions on EBay. Star Wars Galaxies' Creative Director Raph Koster has spoken on MUD-Dev about the potentially positive tradeoffs for real-world auctions of MMOG property. Perhaps Sony/Verant designed the crafting professions, item decay, and in-game bazaar with EBay in mind.

In the absence of legal action, I look forward to Edward Castronova's first SWG economic analysis, and perhaps Julian Dibbell will see about supporting himself in Star Wars.

The Choice to Cheat

I wrote an opinion piece about Xbox live in the June/July issue of Xbox Nation magazine. I said the online game architecture had promise, but the social experience was limited, curtailed. Over the phone Andre Vrignaud from Microsoft promised me there would be enhanced community tools, so you could more easily find friends and stick with them. I came away wondering if the closed network architecture of Xbox Live wasn't a hinderance - limiting the pool of available online players to those owning Xboxes, and curtailing innovation that might come from non-sanctioned community tool development. Vrignaud responded to my skepticism by arguing passionately for the importance of encrypted communications and secure tamper-free game sessions.

For PlayStation 2 online games, developers must create their own online communications and matchup systems. There's no PS2 online user accounts tied to behavior standards and anti-hooligan architecture. The Sony approach is open - they build the machine, developers make the network and community tools that suit their titles.

The most popular PS2 online game has been SOCOM, a tactical team shooter. If I'm not mistaken, SOCOM has sold about as many software copies as Xbox has sold Xbox Live kits. Immensely popular stuff.

But that popularity might be threatened if malicious players are allowed to mess with the game balance; ie, if players are allowed to cheat in human-versus-human online play. GamesIndustry.biz takes up a recent annoucement by Fire International, a game peripherals company that they are releasing a means to cheat in SOCOM for players in Europe. But enterprising fans have beat them to it in the United States - already, according to Jeff Gerstmann at GameSpot, SOCOM has become unplayable for non-cheaters.

Rampant cheating in the unencrypted, open architecture of this popular PS2 online game would appear to vindicate the technological control scheme of Xbox Live. You can't trust players, argues Microsoft, so you have to limit their choices. Xbox Live doesn't trust anything that doesn't have a credit card and a digital signature granted by Microsoft.

But the GamesIndustry article hints at another way to control cheating online - norms. With technological freedom comes social responsibility. Perhaps, GamesIndustry argues, players will boycott any company offering the means to cheat in an online game. You can see scorn and censure for online cheat-enabling in this GamePro article about the Fire International announcement.

Perhaps if there were robust reputation systems in online worlds, players could flag other players who don't follow appropriate rules of conduct. Or maybe the game system could recognize and flag cheaters. There may be people who want to cheat in online games; let them play against people want to play that way. Or is it better not to have the choice to cheat at all?

Growing Galaxies

It's a struggle to tear myself away from Star Wars Galaxies. I bought two copies Friday, but Jane's Vaio laptop won't do hardware transform and lighting so I'm in here alone. Well not quite - somehow people on the fence about massively multiplayer online games have been lured by the mythology and promise of this title; I played because my friends were playing - I played because I expect a wide range of novice and experienced players to mess with and mess around within that gaming system.

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Inside eGenesis: The Simulation of Power and Politics

by Jia Ji
I recently began working at eGenesis, the developers of "A Tale in the Desert" (www.atitd.com), a massively multiplayer online game set in ancient Egypt that just went live about four months ago. It's a small company with a unique product, a MMPOG with no combat but an amazingly complex socioeconomic and legal system. Usually, I describe our game as a historical simulation, a mixture of the Sims and Civilization with real people thrown in to make it interesting.

In ATITD, one of the main goals is to overcome complex challenges called "the tests." We activated one of the tests last week, "The Test of the Demi-Pharaoh." At its core, the test is simple: the people of Egypt elect one player to be the Demi-Pharaoh (DP). The DP's sole impressive, but horrible, power is the ability to permanently exile up to seven player characters (but not accounts) from Egypt. It's really a test of the playerbase's ability to identify leaders who can resist the abuse of power. This is one of the tests in the discipline of leadership - there are also tests in six other disciplines: art, the human body, conflict, worship, architecture, and thought.

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Massively Multi-Played Out

In the last week, I've experimented with a hearty load of English-language multiplayer games: Phantasy Star Online (Xbox and Game Cube), and a mess of PC titles - Battlefield 1942, Puzzle Pirates, Second Life, There.com and ToonTown.

All of this massively multiplaying means one thing - I'm missing the entire point of these games.

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Advantage Playing Online

In single player games, cheating affects only the longevity of play. But in online games, cheating threatens the delicate social construct of multiplayer play. If each person pursues a certain set of skills at their own pace, then it can be upsetting to see someone leap ahead or even affect the value of items and cash in the game by ruthless replicating.

A NYTimes.com piece Do Cheaters Ever Prosper? Just Ask Them examines cheating and game balancing in online multiplayer games, with glimpses into some mass-market multiplayer online fare: Rise of Nations, The Sims Online and Star Wars Galaxies.

One person's "cheating" is another person's "advantage playing." Some users argue that if games build in repetative tasks required to get ahead, then it's only fair that players should be able to use macros, software programs running on top of games to automate click-click-clicking. And still other folks point out that they are playing a conniving character who would work to succeed by any means necessary.

Cheating in shared game environments issue was covered more explicitly from a game designers point of view in a year 2000 piece "How to Hurt the Hackers: The Scoop on Internet Cheating and How You Can Combat It" from Game Developer Magazine (free registration required). There, Matt Pritchard quotes Greg Costikyan: "An online game's success or failure is largely determined by how the players are treated. In other words, the customer experience -- in this case, the player experience -- is the key driver of online success." His short version was, "Cheating undermines success." Whose success? The largest pool of shared success - the mass of players and the game creators who want them paying subscription fees.

MMOG in Print

Former employees of Origin, makers of Ultima Online, launched a magazine devoted on MOGs. Their range seems pretty broad, and they are looking for submissions, so if you're interested you might even get paid!

The Dark Age of Chat

I dreamt last night of three realms. Vast though the lands were, it was possible to communicate directly with other citizens of the realm across great distances, either by sending a private message or addressing a group. I had a list of friends, complete with their alternate identities on other servers, with icons after their names that showed me at a glance their profession, level, location, and whether they were in the realm with me or not. I marveled at this system, in my dream. I admired its beneficent efficiency, its robust architecture. I touched on a name in my list to send an instant communication…

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Sims Online - Social Context for Screwing Around

The first reports from the Sims Online beta test are filtering out - between planned protests, commercialism and unauthorized sexual advances, the Sims Online looks like it will be a rollicking mix of identity issues and social permutations. Not just a game or an online community, the Sims Online promises a masked mix of id and suburban superego.

Here, game researcher Celia Pearce is quoted on an early SIMS Online experience:

Pearce, who is among a group of people helping to test the game before its launch, said she had an experience that was "very telling" early on.
"I went into one of the houses and within 10 minutes I was kissed by another Sim. And I don't even know why or how," she says. "I spent many hours trying to get these two Sims to get together and have a relationship. And to be in the world and be kissed by someone I never met was completely a digression from what I was used to experiencing in the game. And it struck me at that moment that The Sims Online is in fact a fundamental digression from the core philosophy of the game, precisely because it's not a simulation any more.
"I think, intellectually, the idea that you have a mental model of the whole world, and you are the one who's influencing whatever's going on, is fundamentally different than there being a real person on the other end of the line. This guy who just kissed me is a real person and that was weird."

(from Want to get a SIM life?)

When the Sims first came out, many active gamers worked to break the system, make their characters have sex, or die in creative ways. Now people will likely try similar things, but their actions will have a broader social context. Viva Sims Online! Here come troubled, troubling customers!

Enter the "Griefers"

In today's Chicago Tribune, writer Alex Pham writes a remarkably balanced account of people that make life difficult in online multiplayer games.

When Kurt Frerichs comes home from a long day of fixing computers, he likes to eat dinner with his family, tuck his 2-year-old daughter into bed and settle in front of his PC with a steaming cup of black coffee to inflict non-stop misery on his fellow man.

The 25-year-old technology consultant relishes the indiscriminate slaughter of other players in online games, heaping scorn on his victims and exploiting programming bugs to his advantage.

Frerichs is what the online world calls a griefer--someone who plays to make others cry. They stalk, hurl insults, extort, form gangs, kill and loot. Although a tiny percentage of the millions who play online games, griefers are prolific in sowing distress and driving away thousands of paying customers.

A study of the motivations, methods, mannerisms, and community response to malicious online play: "`Griefers' bedevil online gamers." Chicago Tribune free registration required - in case you don't want to bother, there's some select quotes below:

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