Gaming / Virtual Worlds

Last night, one of the kids finally conquered and united Spain, with Byzantine help and despite French and Milanese interference- in Medieval Total War, that is. This led to a discussion about how it really happened, and of course about every boy's hero, Roderigo Diaz y Vivar - or El Cid.. The other was still putting down a revolt in Scotland while Harrying the North.

For those who would decry computer games as dumbing down a generation, I would say look again - watching mine, I can see the benefits compared to my era:

- A deep grasp of History - the kids know their Goths from their Lombards, can spot a Spartan at sixty leagues and are intimately familiar with Carthaginian strategic issues vs Rome. Does it matter? Not if your ambition is to be on Big Brother, but it must have an impact one day if you want to join the Knowledge Economy. (Mind you, watching a program last night on TV re Slebonomics, I wonder....)

- A deep grasp of Politics and Economics - I could barely run a pocket money account, the kids are running countries - balancing economics, strategy, diplomacy, social policy and military effort. That gives the sort of insights that I haven't seen even in business simulation games that I've run over the years.

- A scary grasp of human nature - the Sims is an abstraction of the way we are, but not that much - watching their understanding of people develop via Sims gaming has led to some uncomfortable conversations at home about what really drives people, and what actually works in life.

My own observation is that understanding something in a game leads to curiosity, and researching / reading about it elsewhere - I have been marched to Foyle's by a 10 year old to buy books on Parthians and Sassanids (Persian dynasties, if you must know). Even the shoot-em-ups have some value (reaction times, long discussions on alien technologies and Sci Fi ideas) but we do find we have to limit these, it makes them too aggressive after awhile and they have to let of steam with real world exercise.

I don't know what impact this will have going forward, but I think any kid who is comfortable with the entire panoply of history, can conquer and run a country, and has a scarily perceptive grasp of human frailty by 15 is on a better track than My Generation at that age.

Doubtless there are some things that may be lost. Overprotective parenting means they don't run around the 'burb so much, and are maybe less streetwise therefore - but it is still the role of parents to ensure they face the sort of tests that build self confidence and self reliance in the Real World, despite the abuses of Health & Safety regulations. Some kids lose the opportunity to do more exercise (I think that is also partly a school's role though - kids need to run around, team sports are good for physical and psychological development, and if they are at school all week thats where it needs to happen ). And yes they chat to their friends over social media as well as face to face - but they are chatting more than ever before.

But overall I think they are probably getting a better deal this way.

Article in my Economist today on the real limits to Virtual Worlds, specifically the Google world, Lively - here is the online version:

Lively is a simple environment, amounting to little more than a series of 3-D chat rooms. To enter, you must first download and install a plug-in for your web-browser. You can then choose from a list of rooms, the most popular of which are (inevitably) themed around sex and dating. And although some popular rooms—“Love Sweet Love” and “Sexy Babes Club”—have had thousands of visitors, the number quickly drops into the double digits further down the list. Hardly anyone is using Lively.

Why has it been such a flop? “There’s nothing to do in Lively if you’re not talking to someone,” says Greg Lastowka, an expert on virtual worlds at Rutgers School of Law in New Jersey. Second Life, he says, offers “commerce and creativity”, and Club Penguin (a popular virtual world for children, owned by Disney) has lots of built-in games.

Not very surprised - we did a small comparison piece about 18 months ago on various worlds - Second Life, The Sims, Runescape, WoW, Cyworld and Habbo Hotel being the main ones studied. It was fairly quick 'n dirty - the main work was on the economics of virtual worlds - but the chart below sums up the views we came to. Below the curve = FAIL



The more complex worlds like Second Life also have a minimum time you have to invest to get much benefit - we reckoned it took about (very broadly) 14 hours play to get to a level of basic "unconscious competence" in 2nd Life, and thus felt it was way out of the realm of the mainstream user unless it was simplified. That is represented by the vertical line.

Similarly, my teenage son - the tester of Habbo, got bored with it after about an hour - to quote "Dad, these guys look like Lego men but don't do anything" Granted, an early teenage boy isn't really into "pure" social networks - he is captivated by World of Warcraft (Runescape is seem as a "tweens" game in his mileu as it happens), and it acts as game and social network (and voice telephony system).

But the point is made - it took about 1/2 hour to master Habbo, 1/2 hour to check it out, and then - well the point of decorating your room and talking was lost on them. Buying virtual knick knacks is a staple of virtual world economics, but there is - in our view - a limit to the utlity of just being a social network - which is the horizontal line on the graph.

(I put the "limit to social networking" line a bit into 2nd Life, because my observation was that 80% of the people there hung about in bars or tried on new clothes - and I don't know how many of those stay long term but I suspect thats where the higher dropout rates come from).

By the way, The Sims is the most interesting dynamic - watching teenage boys "game" the system to maximise it is an exercise in human cynicism - god alone knows what they will do with the insights it gives them into people's underlying motives. The girls I watched (older teenage girls) don't play it this way, acting more in the constraint of the game* (and before you go off on your high horse, I must note that is just a game - but not an inaccurate one)

* I think real life experience impacts how you play a game - I learned to play various dogfighting flight sims first by learning to fly, then to shoot etc - the kids learned it by throwing the 'planes around the sky, guns blazing all the time, crashing repeatedly until they got it....

By the way, check out this amazing 2 - world journey from Laurel Papworth's blog. Respect....

I was interested in this article about MMORPGS having the wrong business model, from Wagner James Au on GigaOm, talking about Scott Jennings' views:

To fix the online gaming model, Jennings said some innovative thinking is required. “Embracing open source development, crowd-sourcing content, targeting different platforms such as the Web or mobile phones, all of these are valid,” he suggested. With few exceptions, however, game publishers have been unwilling to take risks. “They aren’t responding to the changing market because they don’t understand how to work things like web technologies into their current income models,” he said. “So instead they keep doing the same things– just more of them, and with higher budgets.”

Jennings points to the ballooning costs of MMORPGs — World of Warcraft is estimated to have cost $40 million to $50 million to develop, and while Age of Conan cost just $25 million, the game is having retention issues, largely because the budget wasn’t big enough, he says. By contrast, he notes, small companies produce low-budget web-based MMOs like Club Penguin and RuneScape that post far higher profits.

I see the argument about lowering cost of production, but it seems to me there is an inherent contradiction here - if its an arms race to bigger budgets and blockbuster productions, how come Runescape etc are profitable? There are similar arms races in other entertainment industries, but there are also limits to the economics of the arms race. Also, its not yet clear that UGC etc is the answer, or a different industry in itself. Most (all?) entertainment industry is a power law game (ie Long Tailed), so there will always be an arms race no matter what.

Also, what does one replace it with - more Free services chasing the same Ad revenues? That doesn't seem like a step forward.....but we will have to find out when we read the eventual history of MMORPGS to know for sure, I guess.

Our regular readers may have noticed a hiatus in posts, this was due to the annual holiday - which was spent sailing a yacht along the Turkish coast. What was interesting compared to the last time I sailed a real sea-going yacht (about 8 years ago) was the amount of extra electronics that it now comes with - GPS / SatNav / Autosteer / Radar / Wind direction etc.

To be sure, these thing existed 8 years ago but (i) quite a few were analog, (ii) the digital stuff was very expensive whereas now they are standard for even a relatively small boat, (iii) the electronics were quite rudimentary then - instruments, whereas they are now clearly computers, and (iv) everything is far more integrated.

What was also interesting was the speed with which the kids picked up on the electronics on the dashboard - it was almost like a computer game to them, using all the input to then navigate and sail the yacht (see picture below)



The impact of this has been to massively reduce the skill level required to sail a yacht - a good thing in that it allows people to access sailing after far fewer hours logged, but also a potentially bad thing for two reasons:

(i) There is a tendency to be overconfident in conditions where instruments, for all their effectiveness, cannot yet sail the ship - for example freshening winds (ie when to release / reef sail), and dealing with non measured things eg side on swell, other boats etc

(ii) The lessening of hours put in meant - in my observation anyway - some of the sailors understood less of the "rules of the road" conventions. This has long been a problem with power boats, where the only qualifications needed in many countries are the ability to write a cheque and to turn an ignition key, but it is more problematic with sailing yachts as they are more complex devices.

(Incidentally, I wonder if the yacht/powerboat thing is an allegory for green technology overall - it is just harder to use it well?)

However, looking at all the data coming in from my own yacht, plus all the potential network data that was also available, it clearly will not be long before even small cruising yachts will be running with pretty sophisticated sailing algorithms (I'm sure big ones do already).

The other thing that interested me was internet access - I was connectable at nearly all times to the 'net, but nearly always via mobile (usually 2G). The issue, though, was cost of data download (hence restricted myself to email only). I can think of a huge number of functions and mashups (incl indirect services such as social nets etc) that could exist if yachts could be networked online on broadband at a low cost, and these too will no doubt come.

Its interesting - while the whole "web 2.0" movement seems to be hooked on FreeConomics to pay for (ostensibly) useful stuff for real people, the Virtual World crowd are getting consumers to pay real money for nonexistant tat. Second Life, World of Warcraft, Habbo Hotel etc all have business models where you pay to play. Latest up is Barbie the cyberbabe - sez GigaOm:

Starting now, Mattel (MAT) is offering a premium subscription option to its phenomenally popular Barbie Girls web-based virtual world. Since Beta launch April 2007, it’s amassed a record-breaking 13 million registered users, with over 2.3 million of those monthly active users.

At $5.99 a month, the new “Barbie Girls V.I.P” account gives girls a wealth of additional perks for their avatars, like a virtual pet, exclusive access to a “Extreme DreamPark”, and, of course, “a special virtual tiara”. Which means starting this week, millions of parents will face a uniquely 21st century dilemma: should they pay 72 bucks a year so their little girls can enjoy playing with Barbies that don’t, in the strictest sense, exist?

So go figure - why is no one prepared to pay for supposedly seriously useful services like Facebook and its poke plethora yet lash out the lolly for something not a lot different if its clear its a game? Maybe Slide should re-orient their superpokes into Barbie... ooops - another double entendre for the record

Two great posts on Read/Write web for the game theorists among you - this post on gaming digg, and then this post pointing to an e-book on social nets as games, by C. Weng.

As readers of this blog will know, we are great fans of using game theory to understand the emergence of new markets, and have used game theory (as well as system dynamics etc) in quite a few of our consulting assignments, and posts reflect this (here, here and here for eg).

That these social networks are games, and are actively being gamed, should come as no surprise to the observer - after all Google is a constant war between its in house geeks and an army of SEO gamers outside, and digg-gaming is well covered..

What is more interesting is that books like these are appearing about Social Net games, much like hack books for the more usual games like Halo etc. The implication is that SocNets are, like Google and digg, going to have to enter the arms race themselves to keep their systems vaguely representative of reality - and therein lies the rub - a gamed digg is one thing, there are always other options - but if you have put all your links in the Facebook basket, say, and then find yourself in a sharply played gaming world - with all that data out there....

Interesting times indeed...another big thing for 2008

Update - saw this post by Dawn Foster as well, and noted the this re reputation systems:

I recently blogged about using reputation systems in communities with a discussion about people can game community reputation systems. The important thing to recognize is whether people are gaming the system in a productive manner that helps the community or in a destructive way that serves only to clutter the community with worthless chatter that annoys other members.

This is a fascinating area of online game theory - for example eBay reputations, where if you black someone they can black you back. This means people tend not to black each other, and instead "damn with faint praise" by saying nothing or being neutral. It is a good system in that only a transactee can (in theory) comment, so reduces the astroturfing Amazon is prone to - though no doubt eBay is gamed too.

Clearly one person who collects a lot of blacks is a bad risk, but they are few and far between - and in fact most of those re-join under new nom de plumes (yet another part of the game structure on eBay)

For most eBayers though, you look at the length of time, variety of transacters, and individual ratings, looking for the faint praise.

Attended the Women in Games talk last night (part of the London Games Festival), its an area of interest to us in that it is such a clear area of arbitrage - these days lots of women have games devices, yet few in the mainstream games industry really write games for them. Hoped to get some insight into the whys and wherefores.

Emma Westecott, Senior Games Researcher at The University of Wales, Newport (and previously Producer on such titles as Starship Titanic) chaired a panel comprising of:

- Nicola Bhalerao, a senior software engineer at Rare and chair of WiG2008 with a focus on encouraging girls and women to engage with games programming as a creative and fulfilling career path.

- Matthew Jeffery - Head of European Recruitment, EA talking of the need to broaden the talent base of development talent and to attract a more diverse workforce.

- Helen Kennedy - originating member of Women in Games, active in driving the academic context of the event forward. Helen’s PhD is in Feminism and Play and she brings substantial expertise in feminist and gender studies to the event.

My take on it all was threefold.

Firstly, it became clear that the games industry was largely populated c 10 years ago by the sort of men who people like Helen love to hate (being un-PC in every conceivable way it would seem), and has remained so - and they haven't really had to change much because by and large their market was growing with them. Now however it is maturing and structurally an all male geek gamer industry is unable to make the stuff it needs to do to attract new audiences, so carries on making ever more expensive versions of what it already does.

Matthew mentioned most in-industry companies totally did not "get" the Wii (or Nintendo DS), and are now scrambling to catch up. Nicola made some good points about the difficulty of attracting women into games development, but I must note that the argument is not only for gaming - its the same issue with attracting women into anything related to the "hard" sciences.

(Postscript - interestingly, Nintendo - makers of Wii and DS has just recruited a senior Yahoo woman in the US)

Secondly there are a lot of Wii's and DS's now in women's hands, and these are the tools of choice - so for anyone who is going to break through, these (or similar devices) are the platforms to use. Point 1 above implies that the current industry is unable to structurally imagine itself out of its current box very easily, so now is the time for (women?) entrepreneurs to strike.

Thirdly, Women in Gaming seems like it has had what I would call "utopian hopes" thrown at it, I frankly felt uncomfortable with some of the feminist Agendas being bandied about last night. Its probably very un-PC to say this, but my take is that Gaming is just a business like any other, and will stand or fall on serving real (women) customers with what they want, rather than cleaving Gaming to any particular set of ideologies / sociologies.

In my view, given the opportunity, the best way to cure gaming of its (apparent) misogyny is to start up companies with different cultures writing games that women want to buy. That would rapidly start the established players changing their ways.

The billion dollar question, of course, is what do women gamers want. Research so far has shown a few general principles about what women like in games:

(i) creativity - do it yourself, or at least some say in defining environments
(ii) being part of a non-competitive, collaborative system (some wags argue that social networks are really just games for women
(iii) using simple, easy to load and use games systems
(iv) tend to like non-zero sum games (ie everyone wins)
(v) are more likely to play casual, Java and Flash-powered web games like Bejeweled5, generally passing on download-install-and-play “hardcore” online world games like World of Warcraft.

Now these are "high" probabilities, ie they do not cover the whole gamut of what women like by a long shot. To be honest, I suspect the best way to write games that women want is for women entrepreneurs to write the sort of games they would like to play.

A useful event though, and very necessary. Thanks also to Thayer Driver who co-organised.

From TechCrunch

Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, may be extending their crackdown on “Broadly Offensive” behavior to Bestiality, following attempts to remove virtual pedophilia (or Age-Play) from Second Life in March.

The Second Life Herald (NSFW) goes on to ask whether consenting adults dressing up like animals and partaking in virtual sex with each other or with human shaped avatars (virtual bestiality) constitutes broadly offensive behavior.

There is also a wonderful debate going on about how accurately a virtual animal has to be rendered to be a participant in an obscene act - Roger Rabbit not apparently, Jessica Rabbit yes.

The initial thought is that you just can't make this stuff up

However, the secondary thought is that yet again Porn (3.D style) is showing the way..........the issues brought up here point to the future differences in legal niceties between virtual and real worlds (i.e. is what is illegal in a real world also illegal in a virtual one - is a virtual crime like this still a crime, as arguably nothing has happened, and the animal is actually an avatar of a human*), and this is just the tip of it - we haven't even started with religious issues yet, but it will come as early adopter geeks give way to mainstream users.

Over the next few years one can imagine a whole host of virtual situations which will create interesting ethical and legal dilemmas.

The worlds may be virtual, but the issues - as with taxation - are real.

*allegedly

Was mulling over something I read in a piece Nic Brisbourne wrote earlier this week , about marketing people paying Linden avatars to hang around their clients' sites to make them look populated / popular, virtual world spam, and an aside about a little script that can make the avatar move.

I was nostalgically taken back to some stuff I first looked at some 10 years ago, ie Evolutionary Algorithms and the wider virtual science of Artificial Life.

For those unfamiliar with these terms, in a nutshell Artificial Life (A-Life) is the creation of self organising artificial systems that behave in life like ways. The underlying rules of quite complex behaviour can be very simple, for example "Boids" was an early very simple simulation of the way that flocks of birds fly - see an explanation here, and this YouTube video below



Anyway, seemed to me that those advertising wonks doing this are total amateurs at this game....if you are going to have false punters anyway ( sockpunters? ) why not have a whole swarm of 'em rather than a paltry few, and why not stick some A-Life routines in so that all those fake avatars can go do lots more that just twitch to the vibe. Send em touring in swarms, let em breed with each other.....

In fact, take it one step farther.........add some more complex A-Life routines and your Avatar can just go touring Second Life on its own, you need never bother to go there, Linden gets its visitor numbers up (hey, why not spawn a few million of its own using Genetic Algorithms while you are at it.), then the PR agencies that flog SL presence continue to make money and the poor old client is none the wiser

Unless they read this of course....

And why stop there...program those artificial avatars with some Messages From Your Client, so next time some sucker tries to chat up some gorgeous creature in SL, he/she gets a whole reel of real time Spam.

With realistic facial gestures and manners to boot.

Yes, you have just met a Spavatar .............. Turing would be proud of us

3D Spam - hah! - you haven't even seen the start of it yet......

Hmmm..I wonder if those nice chaps at IBM are building one of these

So, here is the traffic curve on Alexa for Second Life, the darling of the Web 3.D world. As you can see. the traffic is going down. Now, this clearly cannot be from Second Life usage declining, surely

So we can come to only one conclusion - that for some Strange Reason, Alexa toolbar owners are going elsewhere.