New MMOGs coming out

Gamesonline communities

We’re now definitely in a new era of game development. No longer is the games industry languishing in perpetual geekdom – it’s going mainstream in a big way. Investment dollars are pouring in, and the hype dial is cranked up very high. A lot of this money is going into massively multiplayer games, for better or worse, and most of these are fairly undifferentiated clones are coming out. Their failures will help set more realistic expectations, and investors will realizing going after the same users (WoW players) with the same gameplay (Dikumud) and probably worse technology is not a recipe for success. I speak mainly of PC-based 3d MMOGs here, as differentiation along tech (e.g. browser-based) and system (platforms) unlock different users and necessitate different gameplay.

Okay, enough history and predictions – there are enough people who do that on the net more eloquently than I do. My personal touch here is my excitement about two properties in particular:

1. Lego Universe. It’s interesting to read this little piece on kotaku on the development choices behind LU. Two big design challenges in making kids games are stereotypes and conflict. In modern mainstream media, it’s easier to perpetuate stereotypes and memes than challenge them, but for kids there are higher expectations (as there should be). As for conflict, violence is the easiest way to communicate, participate in, and overcome conflict in games, yet again we have higher expectations for kids media.

I’m excited about LU because the IP is very unique and can deal with problems in a very unique way. I grew up with Lego, as so many kids did, and what this IP has come to mean is Lego is a way to interpret the world and change it’s rules. We’ve seen this in previous Lego titles (like Lego Star Wars) as well as the variety of Lego sets (Castles, Town, Space, etc). Lego is about Lego-izing things we know and love, applying a uniform look, allowing mixing and matching, and sterilizing their meaning for interpretation by kids. There is no death in the Lego world, there’s merely the parts bin. There is no improper merger of ideas in the assembly of Lego pieces, anything goes because everything fits. These are how violence and stereotype can be overcome with the Lego IP – what fits together is acceptable together (girly lego-heads can be put on top of any uniform), and anything that is taken apart is just part of creative destruction, not real destruction, and it can always be put back together. Cognitively, Lego just occupies a different space in our mind than other toys and other properties.

I’m not sure if any other IP is about this reinterpretation of things, versus just being things. Leveraging offline products and building connections between the two is a very smart thing, and in the kids MMOG space, toy companies will be the ones that beat out others (WebKinz being the first example). Lego has the added advantage of having a unique brand that is well-suited for online worlds, and therefore if they don’t mess up execution, I think Lego is in for a very bright future.

Unrelated side note: I have this visual of how re-spawns (a staple MMOG action, whereby a previously killed enemy comes back after a certain time interval so that other players may fight them) will work in LU, kind of like Terminator 2′s liquid metal terminator. The bad knight is ‘killed’ and his pieces scatter to the wind. But after 10 minutes… those pieces slowly move back together until BAM! The knight is reassembled and glows and cries out with his arms high, ready to challenge a new adventurer! I hope they do something like this :)

2. PMOG (or at least the concept it demonstrates). This one’s still under the radar, their public beta just started yesterday. This is a toolbar addition for Firefox that lets players drop quests and level up while they’re going about their normal web browsing. Essentially, it’s using game mechanics to force discovery of new web properties, an extremely smart move if you consider advertising implications (the game essentially holds the players hands and takes them from one property to another, like a guided tour in a museum). It’s also a sign of a much larger concept, which is the expansion and diffusion of game mechanics across daily activities. BF Skinner is rolling in his grave at the concept of being able to enforce behavioral reward structures to daily life – what implications! The game isn’t exactly designed as a psychologists research tool, but functions a bit like it whether or not the authors realize it.

I think this class of applications is likely to grow rapidly in the near future – it’s easy to make, has a huge playing field built in, relies on user-user interaction, and could be damn fun.

Specific mechanics I like about this title are that to level up, you must participate in the creation of content. This UGC angle really sells it for me (along with star ratings), because I’m particularly interested in creation software and inducing people to create. Participation is essential to society, yet the last few generations have grown up used to and demanding passive experiences; an ‘entertain me’ mentality. What’s funny about PMOG (which stands for Passively Multiplayer Online Game) is that while it is passive from the perspective of occupying your attention, it is active in the demands for your participation. Very cool.

 

The Switch

I just made the switch to Apple this past week, with the acquisition of a shiny new Macbook Pro.

As an experienced PC guy who’s built his own computers since he was 12 and has run everything from DOS to Vista, with dabbling in OS9, BeOS, and OS/2, I have to say this is by far the best computing experience I’ve had.

The impetus for this was, of course, the complete and utter failure of Vista to even match XP’s usability. Files were unable to copy, wireless took forever to connect, basic browsing around the UI was unnecessarily slow, and UI elements were different, though not better, and almost always inconsistent. I was left feeling frustrated as a user, disappointed as a designer, and cheated as a customer.

Onto happy things though, OSX is quite a charm. My productivity has increased and at the same time my frustration and uneasiness have decreased.

Update: Shortly after this post Vista SP1 came out, which seemed to rectify some of the most basic issues I had. Also, now that I’ve used the Mac for a few weeks, a few smallish issues have come up. Overall, though, I am very happy with my purchase. Now if Microsoft would just release the *real* Office (2007) on Mac, I would be happy as a clam.

 

Lolcats

Culture

I have to admit, Lolcats are pretty much the funniest and most endearing things on the net. The whole childish language makes the anthropomorphization so much more believable and that believability really adds to the humor. But what I’m most impressed about is the level of wit the caption writers have – what they see in the photos, and what obscure references and narratives they craft with so few words.

Best ones I saw this week:

Funniest

a reference to this guy on mythbusters:


I couldn’t stop laughing on this one.

Best Reference

Best Story

 

Constraints

Gamespsychology

This post over at juice analytics is rather descriptive of my latest project, one which I hope I can launch in January or February. The gist is that constraints really help you focus your thinking, unleash your creativity, and generally make better stuff. I’ve ascribed to this process a lot in my creative work, and with my latest project I’ve taken a more extreme stance by forcing myself to think around many basic things we take for granted.

Constraints are a workout. They require us to use more energy, something we are biologically averse to. We are ‘cognitive misers’, to borrow a term from psychology, as a full 20% of our energy expenditure is devoted to our brain. Constraints are also one of these paradoxes of the human condition – we strive to succeed to remove the constraints in our lives, yet without constraint we have partially undermined our drive to set goals in the first place. In comparisons between stress and performance, psychologists have found that a moderate amount of stress is actually where we achieve optimal performance – not without stress, or overloaded with it. It’s this hunger and uneasiness that moves us forward.

If we were to apply constraints to the world of video games, we’d see a similar pattern. Sony – a company riding off of the massive success of the Playstation 2 – had the least constraints when developing the Playstation 3. The needs of developers, the cost of the system, the desires of gamers for things like online support, and whether the system would be a success were all non-issues to Sony corporate. On the other hand, Microsoft could not afford to dismiss these issues, and consequently made a better product. Nintendo went even further, with a lower price point, less computing power, and most importantly, the least idea of what games would eventually look like on its very unique DS and Wii. The same constraints apply in the casual games market on the web, where the constraint of Adobe Flash has driven some great innovation, while traditional PC games with access to an increasing amount of power languish in the same old gameplay.

Assuming you can stay true to the course of solving your customer’s needs, the constraints theory can break down if you truly do have too few options to explore. Most constraints we would consider extreme still afford a huge amount of possibility, but if it breaks down to a few choices, your creative landscape is compromised. This may be analogous to the over-stressed condition described above.

Constraints are fascinating, and definitely worthy of closer consideration. Stay tuned, I’ll probably do that soon.

 

I Want What Amazon Can’t Give Me

Designpsychology

The other day Jurassic Park caught my eye as I was flipping through some TV stations (yes, I watch, only sometimes though). Being a child of the information age, I’m both easily distracted and a big fan of factual data and the interesting connections between that data. At this time, my internal monologue was something like: ‘oh yeah, I read Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, and probably half of at least two other Crichton books. I want to see what he’s up to these days.’

The first association I have in my mind whenever I consider books or literature is Amazon. They’ve done a great job of occupying that associative gold mine in my mind, and I can only assume this extends to many many other people. One day I look forward to exploring more about first associations and their importance in business, but for now let’s get back on track.

I quickly went to my computer and searched Crichton’s name on Amazon. I even put his full name in, not just his last name. As I hadn’t used Amazon in a while, my mind was fairly fresh and free from expectations shaped by prior experience.

What I get is a list of products from 1 to 16, showing ‘top results’. First reaction: disappointment. What I wanted was a pulse check, a sense of what is happening in the world of Michael Crichton. Instead, I get a shopping list, and one that isn’t even organized in a meaningful fashion (e.g. not by recency, by sales numbers, by rating, etc). How the world’s largest bookseller can get this wrong is beyond me. The questions I wanted to have answered were:

  • What books has he written (so I can see if I want to order some)
  • What has been the history of the author (what themes does he write about, how have they changed, etc)
  • What is the author thinking about now, and doing next

For the first question, I would have liked a list of books by date, and links to their respective editions. For the second question, I would have liked a professional- or user-submitted review about the author, a general overview that is up to date. For the third question, I would have liked either a user- or author-submitted description of what’s going on now, perhaps with links to relevant resources and articles (e.g. if an interview was in NYT recently).

Other things on this page I would have loved would be users discussing the author’s work, friends interested in his work, and similarity links for writing style, subject matter, etc.

Some of these are available on Amazon. They’ve done a lot of work on their UI and shopping experience to provide these tools. But they’re still relying on a single method of displaying results, instead of a portal / vertical search method that recognizes and structures data, such as ‘Michael Crichton is an author, therefore show author page’.

Continuing my experience, as I had heard about Amazon allowing authors to have blogs a while back, I hoped I could find one for him. I clicked around on his name within a book and in a few other places, but I couldn’t come up with one. I even searched a few times on Google. Next reaction: annoyance. I hear about something – Amazon’s author blogs – and I can’t find any mention of it, other than a few posts within Amazon’s daily blog. No ‘this author does not have a blog’, instead no trace whatsoever. Maybe I’m crazy and this feature never existed.

I mentioned I came in with a fresh mind, but I did come with some expectations – namely, the experiences of other sites, such as Wikipedia and IMDB, which provide cross-linked, factual resources for different media. These sites are just a better way to provide information. They both make sense and are very logically structured. The question that I brought with me, ‘what is happening’, is an incredibly common question that people have about authors. Although I wouldn’t argue that ‘I heard about this book’ is the most asked question, I would argue that the ‘what is happening’ question is the second most asked question. Yet 12 years after launching, Amazon still cannot answer that question.

I think that the vast majority of users out there that use Amazon, aside from those that simply want one book and to be done, are what I would call an aspirational casual reader. That is, they aspire to know more and be more literary, but they haven’t the time to be expert hobbyists. Why do I assume this? Because most users across almost all product types are exactly like this – they want easy ways to raise their commitment and interest levels. We are inherently curious, and if we can get data points that build off of where we are ever so slightly, we can get more engaged in things. Products that are well designed understand where people are and give them easy ways to do this.

In the end, it was my job to put together a composite experience between what information was on Wikipedia and IMDB, and what was for sale on Amazon. This composite was both disjointed and time-consuming, and the spark of interest that I had in reading a particular book was lost due to time waste and a feeling that Amazon isn’t meeting my needs as a consumer.

 

Wii, Joy, Counter-Hype

BusinessCultureDesignGamespsychology

Just mere months after a brutal counter-hype cycle of Second Life bore its ugly head, I’m predicting we’re going to have some of the same counter-hype coming to the Wii. But first, allow me to take a slight (large?) tangent and take a step back from the (legitimate or otherwise) complaints about either product to talk about hype.

There exists a perpetual flaw in the media world that any darling like SL or the Wii is bound to not live up to the breathless expectations of journalists. Although I doubt this is an entirely deliberate phenomenon, journalists get a great deal of benefit from the waxing and waning of hype that in aggregate they largely create – cycles of over-hyping followed by over-griping, and then sometimes followed by consolidation and acceptance.

If we were to turn the tools of emotional manipulation we wield with alacrity in game development to this phenomena, we’d find journalism and news have actually become quite good at what we do. First, the hype creates anticipation and excitedness, and translates it into feeling emotions now that are emotions that will come in the future. For instance, just reading about the Wii makes you *feel* the simple joy of playing games, and the social reward of playing with friends, even though you are actually doing neither. Next, the counter-hype plays of your emotions of judgment and naysaying, and branches off into either a sort of “i told you so” even though you probably said nothing, or – if you really bought into the hype – a disappointment that paradoxically drives you to further seek the emotional up and down the news provides. Finally, sometimes the hype ends with consolidation, where you feel closure and a general sense of contentment, possibly with a slight feeling of hope for the future as the story ends on a good note.

With these emotions, the hype model is just plain good story writing.

So, back to the topic at hand: the usage patterns of the Wii are different from other game consoles, yet expectations are the same.

For instance, people aren’t playing the Wii. Or rather, 67% of people aren’t. This is according to publisher Famitsu, although many other Japanese developers are jumping on board to say things like the Wii is a fad. Others may point out that Wii software sales aren’t that great, not even breaking Top 10 sales, that sales figures mean nothing unless people play it, that none of the follow-on titles had the appeal of Wii Sports, etc.

Whatever. Part of opening a new market is discovering that it doesn’t work the same way the old one does. In the case of the Wii, this means that people aren’t buying new titles every 3 months, or counting down the days until the Big Game is released and then dropping a collective $200mm on it. They’re being… how shall we say… a bit more ‘casual’ about their usage. Game publishers, used to catering almost exclusively to a forgiving and predictable gamer customer base, are caught off guard. This doesn’t fit their model of reality. Why would someone buy a game console if they only played it once a month? Don’t they know games get old fast? Meanwhile, the non-gamer with the console under the TV goes about their daily life, barely using the damn thing, but – I posit – still deriving satisfaction from it. How?

For this new audience, usage doesn’t equal value. It’s not an iPod, though it’s small, glossy white, cute, and media-savvy. Nor is it a consumable, defined by it’s rate of replacement. Usage has little to do with it in fact.

Think of some outrageous clothes you have purchased, probably for halloween or a costume party. You wear them maybe twice a year. Yet they occupy a part of your mind and identity, at every thought providing you with an anticipation of positive emotions (just like hype) in the off chance you have the opportunity to show them off. In fact, you’re always on the lookout for those opportunities. Alternately, think about the home fitness market – if it was usage-driven, there’d be no market, nor late night television spots with Christy Brikley and an ageless Chuck Norris. Or perhaps a better analog is a social one – the dining room table. You probably only eat on it when guests are over, preferring a more practical spot to munch on your normal meals. But you know it’s there, in that off-chance you get folks over.

I think the Wii is really an item that exists nowhere near games, and instead in the same space as the above examples. It’s an identity item, something that has a property that you want to be associated with. It’s a novelty item, something you thought you’d use a lot more than you actually did. It’s a social tool, something that once you have you seek opportunities to use it, although rarely actually use. All of these touch on what it actually provides people. The Wii is about simple joys, shared with others – something that is actually not that easy to find in modern life, and something very difficult to distill into a product. And it’s the actual zig-zag, drunken stumble, half-rational path that people take in pursuit of these simple joys that is the market.

 

Poor User Experience: Microsoft Support

Design

My Vista experience on my Thinkpad X41 Tablet been a rather large disappointment: wireless constantly needs to be re-configured, start times are atrocious, the interface is extremely unresponsive, bugs and crashing, etc. Today I got handed my latest disappointment today when I got back my thinkpad from servicing – I have to re-activate windows in 3 days or my computer will stop working, and Microsoft thinks my key is being used on another system. Wonderful. My user experience is as follows:

  1. Windows Activation interface – 4 options – tells me my key is invalid. I press the ‘Contact Microsoft to help resolve this problem’ option
  2. Windows Help and Support interface – 4 option categories (ask my friends, ask the windows community, search the knowledge base, or contact Microsoft) – chose contact Microsoft.
  3. Vista Solution Center website – 12 option categories, each with 10+ options. No forwarding of my particular issue (key in use by another system), just a generic screen with ‘top issues’.
  4. Vista Solution Center product activation section – 8 options – I am not receiving an error messages thus none pertaining to my problem.
  5. Vista Solution Center contacts section – 5 options – ‘Contact a support professional’ selected.
  6. Help and Support website – 10 options – presents the 10 Vista SKUs. No knowledge of my system requirements. Vista Business All-languages non-64 bit edition is selected
  7. Help and Support for Windows Vista Business website – 3 option categories (email, chat, phone). On quick glance, I see dollar figures associated with such services. Trade-off presented: once you contact support, you begin your allocated 90 days of support. Invalid option presented: my software must be activated to get support. I choose to call.
  8. Phone product support system – Many options, 3 choices, 2 times having to describe problem to separate techs who did not forward info, 10 minutes of waiting, 48 numbers recited to a customer support representative, and 48 numbers read back to me. Problem solved.

In total I had to consider at least 41 options and spend 25 minutes resolving this problem. What is additionally frustrating was that this was an anti-piracy measure, though given the levels of piracy out there I understand their position and need to put some protective measures in place. But this was just unreasonable, and punishing a customer for purchasing their product.