Ghosts in the Machine

Is your tin-foil hat affixed?  Yes?  Good.

National Intelligence wants to know what you’re doing in virtual worlds, and to detect suspicious patterns in your behavior. There’s a very informative unclassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to Congress discussing in brief their objectives and reasons for this system.

The interesting section: they propose a program called “Reynard” (which Wired points out was the name of a trickster figure in medieval Europe) which is “a seedling effort to study the emerging phenomenon of social (particularly terrorist) dynamics in virtual worlds and large-scale online games”. It goes on to propose that the project studies social norms in virtual worlds and online games, and thus learns how to look for suspicious behavior amongst players. The program is a pilot, and may “increase its scope to a full project”.

Couple this with the paragraph before this in the report, which discusses the “ProActive Intelligence” project, which examines “causal relationships that are indicative of nefarious activity”.

The number of potential issues this raises is immense, but there are a couple that come to mind that are particularly ridiculous, but not completely impossible.

Narc-Bots

This is going to sound silly, but hey, lets take the government document at its word and take it to an extreme.

You thought gold-farmers were bad. Government terror-detection algorithms are loosed on bots in popular game worlds—uberspy007 on Habbo ? Totally a narc-bot—that level 1 guy in the Barrens who has been sitting in the same place all day? Yeah, narc-bot. The bots look for chat patterns, key words like “bomb”, “beheading”, “Iraq”, log references per character, and if they flag a user as a potentially interesting subject, they request his or her IP information from the developers, and take their investigation out of the virtual world.

If developers were cooperative, they wouldn’t even need bots—just chat logs, game data, or relevant metrics. Or hell, subpoena the information! Do wiretapping laws carry over to virtual worlds? How do you admit evidence gathered in a virtual space into a real life courtroom, or explain it to a jury? There’s a number of interesting precedents that could be set that would pave the way for further legislation and regulation of online communities.

Distributed Intelligence

The power of distributed computing is often touted as a way of achieving super-computer like results for cancer research, finding alien signals amongst radio telescope data, and a host of other altruistic ideals. Distributed intelligence, then, would be using a network of civilian informants in virtual worlds to gather information, report suspicious behaviors, and help gather or supplement the raw data necessary to put together the pattern matching that IARPA/DHS obviously wants. Homebrew intelligence analysts—the same kinds of people who track spy satellites from their backyards for fun—run loggers and data-mining programs while they go about their daily grind online that pump data back to government analysts. It’s like planting a wire on a turncoat mobster, except that there’s no danger of being shot when your “buddies” discover the Feds are listening.

I don’t see either of these things happening soon, but the important takeaway is that in a Congressional report looking at various terror prevention projects, a project to study burgeoning terror threats in “virtual worlds and large-scale online games” was one of the five major bullet points. Participation has become high enough that the spy agencies are interested in monitoring virtual worlds—and as unregulated as they are, I’m sure its a goldmine of grey areas and unchartered domestic spy-craft territory.

The Internet Is Wise

Sometimes the internet knows more about you than you do, and that is always a little scary!

In this particular case, I found out that I play guitar on an album released last October, which seemed improbable until I realized it was by one Alexander Brandon, who I worked with when I was an intern at Ion Storm 6+ years ago.  I had indeed recorded guitar tracks for him, but didn’t realize they’d seen the light of day finally!

It’s a pretty cool sounding record.  You can hear some preview tracks at his music site here.

I play at least some of the acoustic guitars on track 1, “Carolina Steel”.  Its weird hearing something I did so long ago, and hearing it for the first time in context (the track wasn’t built completely when we did those takes, if I recall correctly).  Pretty nifty that he’s held onto it for that long and still wanted to include it (Thanks Alex!).

It is worth Googling yourself occasionally just to find out what secrets the internet is keeping from you about yourself, though it is admittedly hard to for me without digging through a number of sites about how I fought and died for the Scottish people, and some guy named Mel Gibson who apparently played me in a film.

The more you know…

Building Community One String Var At a Time

The Habbo post has seen a lot of traffic in the last few days, so I thought I’d share another observation about their communities before I wander on to my next subject.

MMOGs are large, complex social structures, and people will group themselves into cliques and associations simply because that is the nature of people. We find other people with similar desires and motivations and we form bonds with them. One of the biggest issues that developers should be looking at is: “How do we foster development of communities and encourage grouping of similar users”? I’m a big believer in giving player guilds as many tools as you can to allow them to build strong player communities. As I’ve said before on this site, guilds are one of the most important retention mechanisms we have, and being part of a strong guild is ultimately one of the most satisfying game experiences you can have in an MMOG.

A quick history of my three favorite systems in major MMOGs reveals different ways of looking at the problem:

Everquest 2 had probably the most robust guild system I’ve seen so far. Aside from tools for managing the roster of your guild, guilds had levels, experience, and points that members could help accumulate by doing repeatable game content. Go kill 50 elephants, get guild XP that helps unlock special content for the guild to participate in. Brilliant! This creates need for guild members to participate actively, allows even low level members to contribute something to the guild’s status, creates easy ranking systems (because people love leaderboards!). I’m really surprised no one else has tried to improve on their system, because I think at its core it is the most potentially compelling system of guild building anyone has tried to implement so far.

On Star Wars Galaxies, we tried to group people up with a more abstract system of matching compatible players. You could input your likes, dislikes, zodiacal sign…hell, we had a field for your blood type (this is a big thing in Japanese games and manga, in case you aren’t familiar). The idea here is that you provide a number of criteria so that people who might be compatible in real life are drawn to each other in the game world. Having worked on SWG (but not on this system), I occasionally talk to people who think this was a foolish idea, but I think that the idea is sound and viable.MMOGs are social networks, like dating sites, web 2.0 flash-in-the-pans, and the MySpaces of the world. The only danger here is compromising the anonymity of users by revealing too much real life information, but that is strictly controlled by the user themselves. They share as much or as little as they want, and then are able to seek out potential matches in the game world based on those criteria. You get out of it what you put into it. I think I’m A positive, for the record, indicating that I’m earnest, creative, and sensible at best, but fastidious and over-earnest at worst. Everyone wins!

World of Warcraft’s guild system is comparatively bare bones, allowing adding and subtracting of guild members, ranking of members, and a few other options. It is functional and simple. They’ve also added the ingenious search system allowing people to form shorter term bonds such as finding other people who are specifically interested in finding a partner to do a certain quest or dungeon. They forsake any real-life matching or guild competition for a very functional and practical guild system, and they have a thriving community of guilds because of it.

Habbo…well, Habbo is a different creature in some respects, since it is more virtual-world-chat-room than game. But it has “groups” that players can join. You can be in as many groups as you want. In every MMOG that I can think of, you can be in a single guild, and you have to leave that community to be in other guilds. In Habbo, join as many as you like—I saw people who had several group badges visible on their character. It is friendly design to be allowed access to multiple player communities instead of a single, monogamous guild relationship. Guild purists will take offense at this, I’m sure, but why not allow people to be in multiple groups? The more bonds a player makes to the world, the more likely they are to stick around in that world, which in the end potentially generates revenue for the company, and increases the enjoyment the player gets out of the game.

But, the feature that most players were using to indicate belonging in a community was surprising to me. You see, all characters in Habbo have a “motto” field on their character, which is displayed like a guild tag when you click on their character. Any time a player went in to another player’s establishment and asked for a job, one of the requirements was always that you change your player’s motto field to something like “Works at Joe’s Restaurant”, to indicate you had been accepted amongst that group. It was a working honor system apparently, where people didn’t change their motto to that until the owner of the establishment had explicitly stated it was okay.

You can change that string variable as often as you want to. I saw a number of people who all identified with a pretend FBI organization who all had identical mottos and manners of dress.

That community was being held together in large part by a single string var.

We as developers worry about guild banks, experience points, special guild content, and blood types. Their communities are in large part glued together by a single line of text that is changeable at any time and visible by anyone.

Maybe we’re over-complicating the situation.

Habbos In the Mist

I’ve spent the better part of the last week trawling my way through the world of free, casual, and browser MMOs, as it is a world I am woefully unacquainted with. In an effort to make myself better at what I do, I’m plunging myself into these worlds and seeing what makes them tick.

I started with Habbo, because I’ve heard enough people say “It’s bigger than Warcraft!” that I figure I’m completely out of line having never logged into it. After an initial culture shock, and the nearly impenetrable language barrier—the game’s seemingly target demographic of teenagers have the collective spelling skills of “lolcatz”—I have found a functional little world that, while its appeal misses me almost entirely, reveals a lot about the way people play games.

This is my Habbo—”Platytude”—who I have tagged with the motto “Hobo/Freelance Journalist”. My rules of engagement in the world were that I would never be rude, never interfere, but would try to fit in and would limit my 4th wall breakage to asking questions about play-style and other “interview” type questions.

The Real Fantasies of Gamers

All creatures play. Play behavior is important to all animals in learning skills that they will use in the wild. Human children play with other children to learn appropriate social behavior. Once grown, we use games as a diversion from the routine. After a long day at school or work, fantasy worlds are attractive because the stressors and problems we find in the daily grind are absent in those worlds. We lose ourselves momentarily in a world of orcs and goblins, where the only thing we have to worry about is making the next level.

As developers, we are very convinced that we know the fantasies our various demographics are most interested in. The young adult demographic likes shooting things and racing cars. The older demographic wants casual titles, puzzle and card games. There’s a large subset of people who like traditional fantasy and science fiction.

Habbo doesn’t really have a genre though. Heck, Habbo doesn’t have rules. It is a chat room with blocky graphics, and the ability to decorate your own corner of their virtual space with virtual stuff. Then, you can invite your friends to bring their avatars into your room.

So what do a bunch of young adults do when they’re given a formless world, and are left to their own devices to bring order to chaos?

In my limited experience, the behavior falls into two categories. The first is obvious—when you put a number of mixed gender teens into a social atmosphere, you get high-school level romantic antics of the “he loves me, he loves me not” variety. This behavior is predictable, painful to watch and listen to, and if this were the extent of user activities, I would’ve fled the world within a few short minutes.

The second category is stranger.

They make virtual copies of real life establishments, and then hire other people to “work” in their virtual coffeeshops, sushi parlors, hospitals, jails, etc.

The first room I went to after exploring the large social lobby and hallway areas was a Ruby Tuesday’s restaurant—someone had bought a number of pieces of furniture (with real money I might add—furniture is acquired through micropayments). As I type this, I’m looking at the restaurant list, and there’s a virtual Red Lobster that 16 people are playing in right now. That’s nearly a full raid group, but instead of taking down a raid boss, there are player character waiters scurrying about pretending to serve food to player character patrons.

So I’m in the Red Lobster now. The kindly waiter approached, asked if I needed a menu, then emoted that they had handed me one. I told her my insatiable craving for lobster could only be sated by lobster. She complied, and asked what I wished to drink. I told her more lobster. She scurried off confusedly, saying to wait 5 minutes, while presumably she pretends to pick a lobster from a tank and dunk it in scalding water.

Patrons are rare in here right now. Most people in here are looking for jobs. Most people in MOST Habbo restaurants are looking for jobs.

Is that the fantasy? The number one activity I have observed while living amongst these people is job hunting—they go into establishments looking for pretend jobs with no compensation until someone tells them they can tend a virtual bar. (Having tended virtual bar before, I can sort of identify with this, but this is different…) In a world where there is no actual, scripted gameplay, people resort to opening Starbucks and spending hours a day pretending to make overpriced lattes for ungrateful customers?

Now I’m not a psychologist, but I see a connection between this and play behavior in wild animals. Two tiger cubs might tussle and play-fight to learn important hunting skills. Likewise, whether these kids know it or not, they’re working out real life fantasies and anxieties in this microcosmic world. What are the two things that are most on the minds of teenagers? Sex, and life after high school—the working world. By pretending to serve patrons, make lattes, they’re attempting to teach themself some twisted version of real life work-world social skills.

It even gets stranger. I just walked into Continental Airport, a room with 20 users currently.

There is a line stretching back to the entrance. Yes. These poor saps are all waiting in a virtual airport security line, to be scanned by people pretending to be those friendly TSA folks who tell you you can’t have more than 3 ounces of shampoo on you at any given time lest you be branded a bomb-toting t’urrist. They all give a destination, they are accosted by a security agent who asks them to remove any facial masks, or things he suspects you of carrying, before you’re whisked away.

I’m sure there’s something in the DSM-IV regarding fantasies of being stuck in airport security, and I’m sure it wouldn’t be flattering.

Habbo doesn’t provide any of these. It provides a Lego set…except its a Lego set geared at that awkward age where you’re trying to figure out all the mysteries of life, and what you’re going to do with yourself from now until never. The gamers themselves provide the content, and the content they have demonstrated that they want is a true-to-life micro world where they can emulate what they are going to do “when they grow up”, and in most cases that doesn’t involve shooting or racing anything.

Safe to say, I’m never going to make assumptions about what makes compelling gameplay again.

8 million people a month can’t be wrong. Can they?

(All pictures Copyrigt 2005 Sulake, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used WIth Permission”)

World of Peacecraft

I applaud this guy for rejecting the kill/loot/repeat paradigm and “sticking it to the man”, and pity him for the projected 4-week time frame for levelling from 27 to 28 without killing anything.

It is a neat example, albeit not an enviable one, of atypical gameplay in a fairly structured and predictable game world.

Re-Branding

In an attempt to capture a younger, hipper demographic, I’ve decided to re-brand the site.

The site has needed a name for a while (other than “Hey, I’m Will Wallace and this is my site! It’s about gaaaames”), and my last rant about MMO content led me to a name that won’t necessarily relate to all my content, but that I thought was catchy.

The Skinnerboxer Rebellion

For those unfamiliar with the term “Skinner Box”—and anyone reading a blog about MMOs should damn well know it—it refers to the “operant conditioning chamber” created by B.F. Skinner that teaches unsuspecting mice that hitting a lever will most likely give them delicious food pellets, so they really ought to keep hitting that lever, because who doesn’t love tasty food pellets?

It is a term that is commonly used to describe online games, and I think that as an industry we need to change that. The wikipedia entry I linked not only references online games as a modern human equivalent to the electro-rat-o-food-o-box, but also slot machines. I don’t think that comparing our industry to gambling is favorable, and certainly not something we should encourage.

So I’ve picked a new name that reflects where I think online games should be heading, and that is also conveniently a geeky play on words on a Chinese anti-imperialist people’s movement.

Hurrah!

Why Can’t I WoW Like I Used To?

    I used to be able to WOW all day long. I’m not saying I was ever hardcore. That’s going a little far. I’ve done a couple of Molten Core runs, a few times through Karazhan. I’ve taken two characters to level 70, and another into the mid fifties.

I’ve never played a warlock, so I took the liberty of doing so during the Christmas break. I rolled a Blood Elf warlock, to be precise, because I had never finished playing all the new B’elf content. Kill two birds with one stone…yes, clever. A few days to get back into the swing of things, and before I know it I’ll be 70 and taking over the world. Of Warcraft.

Or, I’ll play a couple of hours total over the course of a few days before realizing that there’s no way I can get back into it.  That’s kind of what actually happened.

So why can’t I WOW like I used to?

The games I’ve played for the last couple of months have chiefly been story, environment, and character driven single player titles, or skill based games—examples of the former being Mass Effect, Portal, and BioShock, example of the latter being Rock Band. Reconnecting with single player games has made me understand a couple of things that MMOs lack, especially when you’ve invested a lot of time in one, as I have with Warcraft.

People understand stories. We can tell our lives as stories—”I was born, then I grew up, then some things happened…”. MMOs are ostensibly the evolving stories of the player character—as well as the evolving stories of the other 8.99 million in the game world. But the two things that make stories interesting are interesting conflicts and characters that we can connect with in some way.

It can be argued that MMOs are full of conflict—you’re constantly in conflict with your environment, fighting monsters and other non-player entities. But can you remember 99% of those encounters? Combat happens nearly constantly, you fight the same monsters over and over again, and even if you have a particularly engaging fight with a boss, you’ll likely be in that same position many times over, and the novelty will wear off quickly. It is hard to keep conflict interesting when your players are constantly experiencing deja vu. 5-man dungeons are like the movie Groundhog Day—you keep waking up in the same situation, all the factors are the same, but you learn something slightly different each time you go in until you’ve finally perfected the fight (or gotten all the loot), and no longer “wake up” in that same situation.

I can remember…hmm…almost none of the fights I ever had in my days of playing Ultima Online. However, I can remember all the interesting conflict that arose from my interactions with players who were trying to develop their own content and craft their own identities. Many people consider “roleplayer” to be a filthy word (I wonder if Rock Band has that on their obscenity filter?). In UO, these were the people who actually crafted game experiences worthy enough to be easily recalled 10 years later, because they introduced traditional storytelling elements into a game world where conflict was nigh-meaningless. They gave context to chaos. World of Warcraft took this to the next level by making progress in the game almost entirely based on quests (as opposed to the random killing prevalent in UO and other games). However, once you get past the page of text that introduces the quest, you quickly realize that it’s simply putting chaos into a shiny Cracker Jack box, and if you eat through the sweets within, you’ll reach the bonus experience points and the toy hidden within.

That’s half of why I can’t WoW anymore. I can no longer kid myself that I’m weaving a story with my character—the story I’m writing is “Kill, loot, repeat”, and after two level 70 characters, I’m fully aware of this. And having just ended a year that produced some of the very best single player experiences I’ve ever played, this suddenly hurts a lot worse than it did.

The other thing that it lacks is meaningful characters. Let’s take a look at Mass Effect for a moment (last year’s Game of the Year for me, and not just cause I’m Biosed…err…biased….). I went and talked with all my companions after every mission, listened to what they had to say, and jumped at the chance to do things for some of them because I understood their motivations, was drawn in by their tribulations, and in general, since I was playing a goody-two-shoes character, wanted to make them as happy as I could (Except for Kaidan, who I found annoying and unlikeable, so I avoided him like the plague).

Compare this with…well, Mankrik, in the Barrens. Mankrik lost his wife. We all feel very badly about this, though not as badly as we did about wasting half an hour walking all over the southern part of that zone trying to find her mangled body in that little yurt. When you come back to Mankrik, he’s very sad, but grateful. And then it’s like nothing ever happened. No fallout, no feeling of compassion—Mankrik is just a means to get 1000xp and a few silver. When Wrex in ME (SPOILER ALERT) asks you to help him retrieve his family’s ceremonial armor from a weapons dealer who has ended up with it somehow, you are willing to go all O.J. Simpson on the weapons dealer to get Wrex’s stuff back, because you know his history, his race’s history, his family troubles…you know that it’s important to him that you do this, and that it will positively affect your relationship with him in the future.

It would be hard to imagine Mankrik becoming a permanent fixture in your character’s life. However, WoW has a built in feature that makes that unnecessary. Guilds! One of the most read pieces on my blog (I think like 10 or 15 people have looked it) was a post I did a while back on why “guilds should not be a hardcore feature” in a game. Besides being an excellent retention mechanic in general, they provide complexity of character. Active guild drama can be as compelling as some non-player character development. When you put enough real people into a confined space together, the egos will inevitably come out to play, and recognizable character archetypes will emerge from the guild ranks.

The problem is that although guild drama can be compelling in the same way a train wreck is, it isn’t necessarily as entertaining as good storytelling and traditional character development. I find it impossible to take actually, and there’s nothing like guild drama or guild pressure to keep me away from an online game for a prolonged period of time. So, of course, my little warlock is uninclined to make joining a guild part of his story, and thus I’m stuck with flat characters and occasional one-off encounters with people in the game world I’m likely to never speak to again.

So that’s both parts. Character and conflict. Single player titles have reminded me how much I love both of these things, and how current MMO offerings are mostly devoid of both, even if their core mechanics are fun. When I played and finished Mass Effect and Portal, the key thing driving my play sessions was my thirst to know what happens next. When you pick up a really good book, it’s hard to put down because you want to know what happens next. When you pick up a really good game, you want to play more because you want to know what happens next.

When I play MMOs now, I know what happens next already. I kill some things, then I loot some things. I might pick up a package or two and deliver them to somebody else. If I’m really lucky, a nice item will drop, and it will keep me wondering when the next nice item will drop. But I always know what happens next.
This post got a little unfocused somewhere around the second or third sentence, so I think I’d like to summarize my point:

• Traditional MMOs are not the story of your character. More correctly, they are the story of your character, but that story is not interesting. Most people’s stories read exactly the same—kill, loot, kill, loot, level, kill, loot.
• The simplest fix for this is to encourage emergent player behavior. Make guilds easy to form. Give players easy access to guild search tools. Provide good guildmaster tools that allow people to run collectives easily. Provide ways for players to make simple game content (player housing in UO was a wonderful catalyst for both roleplay encounters and guild formation). Being able to organize people and stake some minor claim on the game world allows people to tell their own story, and if that story is compelling, they are more likely to want to know what happens next.

Rock Band’s Obscenity Filter…

…is a little hard to decipher.

While creating a new band with friends last night, my girlfriend created a female singer named “Victrola”.  We were immediately informed that this name “was not considered classy” and would not show up on XBox Live until we had made it not-dirty.

I realize that some of the letters in this word are inherently dirty.

“ic” can be used in any number of filthy words.

One can’t spell trollop without that “tr”.

Likewise, the letter “O” has been on several FCC watchlists for a while, and the use of it on any further programming may result in Jacksonesque fines to media outlets foolish enough to use it.

I encourage anyone to figure out what filthy meaning victrola could possibly have.  And yes, I did check the Urban Dictionary.  Nada.

For your edification, GIS for victrola.  NSFW, if your boss is offended by risque pictures of dead media.

Passage

I figure Raph and others have covered this already, but I just checked out “Passage“, which is well worth the 5 minutes of your life that it takes to play.  Rarely does the word “poignant” get used when talking about games, but I think this qualifies.

I have also rarely played a game that puts marriage in such a negative light, as all I learned from playing is that taking my pixelated wife at the beginning keeps me from getting all the good loot.  You’ve been warned!

Portal Design Review (Minor Spoiler Content)

I started playing Portal this afternoon. Then I finished playing Portal. Incredibly satisfying experience, despite the fact it was only a couple of short hours of gameplay. Here’s what I have to say about it, design wise.

Pro: The Game Is the Tutorial/The Tutorial is the Game

Big plus. The game doesn’t have to stop and teach you how to do anything. It is a perfect example of the sliding scale of introducing features and abilities to the player. I didn’t feel overwhelemed at any point, and I walked away from each challenge with a mastery of the skill provided.

Related Con: You Never Get To Use That Mastery

Well, not quite “never”. You get the little course after the 19th puzzle where you get to apply the knowledge you gathered, but that’s it. Most times when you finish mastering a skill and perform the assigned task, it is wasted knowledge, because the number of future applications is minute or non existent. Frustrating.

Pro: Reflexes Count, Precision Doesn’t (Necessarily)

Sure, there are some wicked portal-jump puzzles, but did you notice that most of the power pellet puzzles and rocket re-direction puzzles didn’t have to be spot on? It felt like as long as I grokked the concept of the puzzle that precision was not a necessity. Likewise, on complicated drop-on-portal-leap-wildly-through-the-air puzzles, it seemed like it would take care to land me someplace workable, so I didn’t have to try it multiple times. Maybe I just rock and was always spot on, but it seemed to guide me a bit. Very user friendly without being too easy.

Likewise, unlike most FPS style games, there are no guns, no bullets, no aiming to kill things. The portal gun is an elegant weapon from a more civilized age.

Pro: Killer Voiceover, Unrelenting Sense of Humor

Last time I laughed out loud at voiceover in an FPS (and not because it was atrocious)? About an hour ago. Before that? Uhh, I’ll get back to you. Never, maybe? Only one character to voice, but what a character. They should’ve written some lines for the companion cube. I would’ve sat and conversed with it. It looked lonely.

A++ voice over work, which is rare in a world that gives you examples like these.

Pro: Hurray for Asset Re-Use!

I could probably count on my hands and feet the number of decor assets used, and there were only 3 palettes used for the rooms that I could count—test area, industrial area, office area. They used the same cube art again and again (minus the heart decals on that adorable companion cube). And the cool part about all that asset reuse? I didn’t care! I didn’t spend any time bemoaning the lack of a change in scenery, because I was too caught up in the gameplay and the dialogue. Here, at least, gameplay > art diversity.

So, if you haven’t played Portal yet, you’re missing out. Go, play it now. When you finish, I will throw a party for you and all your friends. There will be cake.