Programmer Joe

Gamasutra reports on a study on games from Australia:

The report, which was issued by the IEAA (Interactive Entertainment Association of Australia) game industry association, was based on data compiled by the Bond University Centre for New Media Research from surveys of about 1,606 households and 3,386 individuals. Of those individuals surveyed, 41 percent of the respondents were female (up from 38 percent), while 8 percent were seniors over 60 years old. The oldest gamer surveyed was 84 years old.

Lots of interesting charts and stats in the study itself. The Gamasutra article mostly just digests it.

Kathy Sierra posted a short entry titled “Let them do the thing everyone else tells them not to”. Here’s the relevant bit:

This sign at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Syndey, Australia took me by surprise. So many signs tell us what we can’t do, and it’s delightful to see the opposite. We need more of this. And I love the, “Entry is free — but if you would like to help preserve this wonderful place…” How can you refuse?

It’s the shortest entry I’ve read on her site, but it did get me thinking. MMOs are chock full of rules about what you can and can’t do. The World of Warcraft terms of use, for instance, are 13 screens of text, most of which are the things you can’t do.

At least three games have gotten a lot of mileage out of actually encouraging behavior that was “bad” in other games. Shadowbane ran a major hype campaign around “play2crush” and “I don’t play games to bake bread.” All the major games at that point were restricting PvP to people who had flipped their flag either directly or by entering a PvP zone. This “PK all you want!” attitude appealed to lot of people who wanted to be free from all those restrictions. Serious technical problems prevented the game from holding on to them, but right after launch they had 80,000 subscribers because of all the hype.

The other example of a game that tells you to do what you can’t do in other games is EVE: Online. There may be NPC-driven consequences in some areas, but they let you blow up any ship at any time (or at least try.) Probably more significantly, however, is that CCP is not going to stop one player from scamming a bunch of others out of an estimated $170,000: (From Razorwire)

On Friday, September 1st, I got to attend a virtual press conference held by CCP so that they could clear up some mis-information about the recent EIB scam. On hand to discuss the situation was Magnus Bergsson, CMO for CCP. One of the things he wanted to make clear was that the 790 billion ISK figure may be an inflated estimate, and that due to attempts to “launder” the cash through several accounts, it may take time to track down an exact amount, if it’s even possible. He also wanted to reiterate that the EIB was not an official banking option that was controlled by CCP, the EIB was strictly a player-run enterprise. He then stated that the Development Team wants to ensure a freedom of playstyle for EVE, and even though CCP do not agree with cally’s actions, they see an importance that those actions are possible.

While it’s not clear that the hard-core “run your own Ponzi scheme” approach is getting them many fans, their ability to PvP anywhere is very popular. And unlike most games, they’re still growing after almost 4 years.

And PvP restrictions aren’t the only rule that’s broken by certain games. Second Life doesn’t have the “no sex in front of random passersby” restrictions that most games have. It doesn’t get nearly as much press, but from what I’ve heard Furcadia also allows adult-only content in certain parts of its world. Second Life is also taking their client open source. That pretty much blows the doors off the “don’t hack the client” restriction.

And of course lots of games have RMT these days, so the fact that it’s forbidden in others isn’t really something you can offer exclusive freedom from.

I wonder if there are other Terms of Service that a game could be broken as a selling point. The remaining ones in the WoW Terms of Use are:

• No gray shards
• No Denial of Service attacks
• No copyright infringement
• A bunch of naming restrictions (including “no leet speak”, which people break constantly)
• No harassment
• No spamming
• No spoofing
• No exploiting of exploits

Of those, gray shards seem to be the most promising. If you could come up with a way to allow anybody to host a world instance and set the rules in that world, but still keep collecting revenue from those players, you could probably draw a lot of attention.

Are there any other rules enforced by most MMOs that you think we could design a game without? What about rules that are enforced by the game itself rather than the Terms of Service? Do any of those need breaking?

I put the site up on January 7, 2007. Through January 30 Akismet trapped two spam messages and one of those was a legit comment. Today it trapped 33 spam messages, all of which were spam. I guess the honeymoon is over.

One of the Project Horseshoe reports includes the question, “How could one build a game that delivers the experience of tasting a peach?” An article at 1Up asks, “Can a game make you cry?” Eric Zimmerman hosts the Game Design Challenge panel at GDC… the first one was “How do you make a game about a love story?”

My answer to each of these questions is, “Who cares?” All of these are interesting topics to BS about in various collections of game developers, but at the end of the day, this is not how these things are actually going to be accomplished. One day some guy we’ve never heard of will decide that what he really wants to do is to make a game about a love story. Let’s call him Betty (because I hope he’s actually a woman. We need more of those in this industry.)

Betty will come up with some game that she’s sure will launch this new genre, but it will not do very well. After all this was Betty’s first game and she didn’t really know what she was doing. Undeterred, she’ll try again, and again, and will eventually reach her goal. Maybe her game will be a huge commercial success, or maybe not, but it will be a game that gives the player the same sort of feeling they get from a romantic book or movie.

The reason that Betty will ultimately succeed is that making a game about love is her passion. She’ll keep plugging away until she gets it right and won’t listen to the people who tell her it’s not possible. She won’t get her ideas by sitting in a BS session at a conference, she’ll incorporate bits of other media, parts of existing games, scraps from books, and portions of her own life, and make game after game until the work, improving each one with the results from the previous try.

This is how it always works. A great (and recent) example of this happening, is the story of Harmonix. According to their website, this is how it started:

Harmonix was founded in 1995 by Alex Rigopulos (CEO) and Eran Egozy (CTO), who met while working in the computer music group at the MIT Media Laboratory. Alex and Eran formed Harmonix initially not to develop videogames, but rather to create new ways for non-musicians to experience the unique joy that comes from making music.

Their first two attempts at doing this with a game did fairly well in the marketplace, but didn’t really reach the goal of showing non-musicians the joy of making music. They didn’t stop there, though, and eventually came out with Guitar Hero. Talk about a game that makes you feel like you’re making music…

As far as I know nobody actually cares enough about putting the taste of peaches, tear-jerking, or love stories into games to actually show this kind of dedication. The people who participate in this sort intellectual exploration aren’t going to bring about these sorts of games. At best they are providing a little entertainment for the rest of us.

So if you really care about these sort of radically different game designs, don’t just talk about them. And if you aren’t, why don’t you talk about something you do care about? I bet those ideas are more interesting anyway, and way more likely to ever be implemented.

But who isn’t?

I am: Gregory Benford A master literary stylist who is also a working scientist.