Prophesy of Pendor - the Designers View

This is the first post on Blogspot, the previous posts were manually ported over to this site from another hosting service.

It has been 20 days since the release of Prophesy of Pendor, the mod for Mount&Blade. We have over 7500 direct downloads, and over 1850 patch updates. For those of you who do not know, Mount&Blade is an independent game offering from a development house out of Turkey and more information on their offering can be found on past pages.

The success of Prophesy of Pendor, to date, is interesting to me on several levels. It should be interesting to you as well as it helps support some of the design concepts that I have been talking about.

The strength of a game is not measured in how often you play it. It is measured in how much you think about it when you are not playing. To do this effectively you have to keep alive what I like to call the unanswered question. If you think of your favorite television shows, movie franchises and books, you will see that this is a common trend in those that are very successful. Games are the same way.

One of the keys of course is pattern recognition. When we create a game that has identifiable patterns, and we, as the player, know what, when, how, where and who, then the experience becomes redundant. In MMORPG’s this is the point that social interaction and social ties becomes the bonds that keep us playing. No such social bonds exist with single player games. We go out and purchase the next game. In some cases, if we are savvy enough, we delve into the Mods and play those for a while then move on.

Part of the reason that this Mod is enjoying success is that it was designed to keep alive unanswered questions and uses elementary chaos theory to deliver content. This latter piece will be expanded in a later released to drive events in the game world so that no two games will be the same.

Technically I have created a scenario that simulates a heroic journey. This is a key element, luckily inherent in the Mount&Blade engine, is heavily accented in this mod.

The environment is framed in such a way as things in the game world can be identified to larger story elements that form meaning for the players. Meaning is key here, players are able to extrapolate from what they experience in the game and apply it to the story and to characters in and out of the game. It all ties together to form a holistic experience, and drives discovery, answers existing questions and generates more questions.

Most interestingly, and this will be accelerated in the next release, it blurs the line between reality and fantasy to the point that playing the game itself and finishing it has meaning beyond just the game.

The key concepts here are creating meaning, delivering content and events in ways that are not expected, and keeping unanswered questions alive. A game ends for a player when one of these three elements ceases. If there is no meaning, or if the content is delivered in recognizable chunks which is easily definable, or that there are no more questions to ask, the player realizes that they are done, regardless whether they have driven the game to its conclusion or not.

On another topic close to my heart is to talk again about Product vs. Service and why a product oriented approach fails us as gamers. I had a very interesting experience on the Forums of Mount&Blade recently where some players took offense to the idea of a service-based approach to a game offering. My guess is that they just do not understand the ramifications. That is ok, as I fully am aware that new concepts that are outside our experience are very difficult for folks to understand.

So, lets go over this a bit and do this exercise together.

If you owned a game company, how do you make your money? That is simple right? You make a game and sell it to a publisher and they pay you lots of cash right? That is roughly how it works with of course some royalty payments if you are lucky.

Here is the problem. As the owner of the company you have to keep making new games to stay in business and keep the cash flow positive. Thus as the game company you must intentionally, and pay attention here gamers, NOT CREATE A GAME THAT CAN BE PLAYED FOR YEARS AND DELIVER ALL OF THE FEATURES THAT GAMERS WANT.

In short game development shops will never deliver that ultimate gaming experience. Once they do that, you, the gamer, stop buying new games, and they are out of business.

What this means guys, and I am talking to those gamers who were so adamantly against the concept of gaming as a service, is that you will never see a game that delivers the type of experience that you will enjoy and explore for years as long as it is a product. Yes you will see some Mods and yes you will see some minor improvements, but in the end, the only entity who wins from this scenario is the publisher, the distributors and the retailers.

The guy with the short end of the stick is you, the gamer.

The development houses historically have competed like this for many years, and this was not ever an issue as the central theme of generational improvements was based in graphics. Much better graphics, very little improvement on game play and you had a hit. That is what everyone talked about right? That is what the gaming population today is conditioned (and I use this term in the true behaviorist sense), to accept.

Well, we have reached or will shortly reach, that point of realism in our graphics engines that will exceed the capabilities of our eyes and brains to determine a significant difference between generations of graphic improvements.

What happens to the product paradigm then?

Food for thought.

Peace out,


Jim

Response to Commentor December 29th

First, thank you for your comments. It is gratifying to know that I am not speaking into the void. While I know that we have folks visiting this site, there is always a wonder as to who they are and is any of this soliloquy finding a home in someone’s thoughts. It is doubly rewarding to find out that not only do I know you in a past life, but that that you have the market savvy and business acumen to engage in a meaningful dialogue.

“ While I personally have a need for the “better game design / system” you describe, I wonder if the gaming masses have the same need. This is the business quandry that I believe current gaming developers are in (and a problem investors may see as well). Also, if the audience is large enough – what is the realistic path for this type of “product/service” to come to market? “

I believe that the gaming masses do not have the same need. They do have the need and desire to consume content, be entertained, and receive value for their entertainment dollar. I believe, and the literature world substantiates this, that there are hundreds if not thousands of niche markets and sub-cultures in our target market. There are those folks who are avid Flash Gordon fans, any number of Japanese anime series fans, vampire fans, Gothic fans, Arthurian Legend fans etc. The list is as long as our imaginations will take us. One of the powerful aspects of this type of offering is that it allows folks who are part of these niche markets to create offerings that are of interest to themselves and their niche market and bring forth creations that otherwise would never see the light of day.

Regarding the product and the service and charging a license fee for the toolkit. This is not the first time I have this proposal and would like to explore this concept a bit. One of the main goals here is to lower the barrier to entry for high-end gamers to participate. If we charge for the toolkit beyond the $15.00 per month game service charge, we lower the amount of high-end gamers who would participate. I ask then, what is the net gain? The company makes a little more up front, but will reduce the amount of “Game-crafters” who are providing offerings, thus reducing the innovation, and volume of offerings which in turn will reduce the total subscription base. Now an argument can be put forth that by charging for the toolkit we increase the quality of the game offerings as we likely will engage only those who more successful and able to make these games. My counter to this is J.K. Rowling: An unemployed mother who had a vision and a need to tell a story. If she had to purchase a license costing a hundred dollars or more to or more to have the chance to publisher her story, I wonder if it would have happened? For every success like hers, there are a dozen that never got past the various barriers to see the light of day. Besides all of these, if we engage more people who are trying the toolkit rather than are playing games (or both), we effectively are charging a monthly service fee for using the toolkit.

I think you are right on the Game-crafters that are out there that are manifesting themselves in the modding community. Even then we are not hitting the cream of the potential providers as to be a modder, you must know how to program and/or script and be pretty good at it to be successful.

I agree that if the company started out with some decent content, it would be a slam dunk. In regard to your comment of “ This audience appears to be there, but they do not appear to demand this more dynamic game and they are still willing to buy junk.“, I bet I could easily find over 250,000 (I did an analysis a few years ago and postulated that there are closer to a million) posts in the various game forums alluding to the need for dynamic content or asking for features that would be supported by this type of offering. One by-product that the game service brings, which I have not discussed yet is that once we have a low barrier to entry, a game-crafter creates his/her creation, then they will not just sit there. They will tell their friends, and their gaming-buddies about it and actively try to get them to join. This means, in effect, that we have created a channel sales force selling the service. This is a departure from the social “I am here and lets go hang out”, to “I have created something you will really like and come check it out!”

Pathway to success:

You have a solid grasp of how to bring ideas to market in the software and gaming world and I am appreciative that you bring this experience to this discussion.

We attempted the investor approach when we first tried to peddle this idea back in 2003. We had a great deal of interest, in that Angels wanted to invest 100K for a proof of concept. That was the major stumbling block for us, as how do you provide a proof of concept of this type of service? Some of the objections we encountered were listed above, as well as many folks did not believe that the on-line game industry was more than maybe 1 Million total subscribers. Remember that this was 2003-2004 and the top dog was still regarded as Everquest. Did we have some credibility issues? To a point we did, and I am sure that hurt us as neither of us were currently employed in the on-line gaming industry.

Check out the history of MMO http://www.mmogchart.com/analysis-and-conclusions/

This is a site that I consider one of the most important overviews out in cyberspace.

Today, you are spot on in that investment would be a hard sell. The only saving grace is that entertainment sales are growing, which has been my experience that in hard times, folks tend to consume more offerings that take them away from the problems of their real world.

The Hobbyist approach I believe you are correct, unless it were a socialized network of folks working on a concept of open source. Even then, the organization of something like this would be a long shot at best.

The indie approach is interesting and one that I had not fully considered. Maybe this is something we should discuss with the folks at Taleworlds? The trick is that they have to be large and/or connected enough to be able to fund it, and small enough to be willing to listen to a proposal.

The corporate developer is an avenue we considered, but once you hand someone the idea, prove that it works, you have lost all rights to it. One painful lesson I have learned over the years is that your legal rights only matter if you have the economic resources to fight for them.

Besides this, Bioware was the originator of this type of community, but amazingly, they refuse to either hear any idea that does not originate with them, and their goals are aimed at becoming the top tier gaming studio, not a publishing service. Their super secret Austin studio has recently revealed they have been working on the new Star Wars MMORPG for the last two years.

The two major competitors whom I mentioned who were thinking along these lines in 2003 were Kaneva and Multiverse. Both have transformed themselves in different directions, perhaps for the same reasons: To provide some proof of concept or meet some objective before they received funding. Last time I checked, Kaneva is now a social game world, and Multiverse is focusing on bringing “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” to market while still otherwise plugging along aiming at the low end developer, with limited success.

Yes, this project would be long term as any MMORPG is these days. Years of development work, likely around 36 months and a cost of around 15 to 20 Million if you are careful and prudent.

I am glad you liked Mount&Blade, it has a strong appeal. Regarding popularity of this blog: yes, my hope is, and the blog stats bear this out, that I have a significant spike in interest since releasing the Prophesy of Pendor mod for Mount&Blade.

I have no idea who you could be. Time and experience change us all. I know that my experience and knowledge has expanded exponentially since I stepped out of gaming in 1994. I know a score of folks who could hold this conversation based upon their experience and education at that time. Since then I am sure that I can add a few hundred more to that list. I look forward to when you get in touch with me and solve this mystery.

Best,

Jim

Tying it all together

We talked a few posts ago about dynamic environments, and about focusing on guilds, and recently about the vision of a game publishing service.

Let us tie all of these together into a single bundle and discuss how they play together. What I am describing to you is Digital Lore, and the Lore Crafting Game System I worked on for several years with Dr. Paul Sincock.

The offering was initially a MMORPG game, much like about a hundred other offerings out there at first glance. But with a big twist. The twist was in addition to the game offering, the player also received the Lore Crafting Game System and was encouraged to delve into their creativity to develop additional offerings.
There were three interfaces. The first one was the one you played the game with, the second was the one you developed your game world with, and the last one was the GM interface that allowed the player to interact with the live offering they had created and published.

From the player perspective they launched the program, signed-on and connected to the game service. The first menu they viewed the various games they could play, a list of recently visited and favorites. Once the offering was in full swing, there would be thousands of offerings. The player selected their choice and one of three things would happen.

!) They are connected to the on-line game choice.( These are games hosted by the game service.)
2) They were taken to a download page to download a single player game.
3) They would begin playing a previously downloaded single player game.

It is pretty straightforward from the player perspective, which is essential for success. The service infrastructure would allow the player to play these games if their account was active, inclusive of the local single player games. The service infrastructure also would record the time the player spent on a given title playing it, regardless if the title was a local offering or an on-line offering.

The second interface is the GM interface, which allows a developer/Game-master to view their on-line offering as the players are playing it. This interface is game-like, and allows them to create or modify spheres of influence, spawn points and well as to perform administrative tasks such as moving stuck players, and to deal with game related customer service issues.

The last interface is the world creation interface that allows the high-end player to create a game world, populate it, create dialogue etc. It is essential that this interface be aimed at, available for and usable by, the high end gamer and not a developer. The goal here is to lower the barrier to entry for storytellers, game designers and creative people who are not necessarily programmers to be able to use this tool to express their creative ideas.

There are many questions and objections folks have at this point so I will address them as I best remember them.

Who owns the intellectual property? This is somewhat of a departure from current thought so please engage me here. The creative intellectual property belongs to the writer or designer of the game. He owns it all of the property and the company owns the actual bits and bytes on the servers which they LEASE to the designer for use to host his designs. The same concept applies to players. A Designer owns the player’s characters data and information which they in turn LEASE to the player, in exchange for monthly fees. The terms of the lease allow the player to change, modify or dispose of the data associated with that character. This approach is designed to head off the future legal issues surrounding the ownership and virtual crime questions that will be bubbling up in the next decade.

What happens if the designers decide to drop the service? Then they drop the service and the game offering is removed from the stack. No harm, no foul.

I can see hundreds of lousy titles being offered, how do you deal with that? The company creates a rating system as well as a usage system that yields both performance data (how much usage a title generates) as well as a rating system (how well the player community likes a given title.. one vote per month.). The rating and performance information are transparent to all players and is used as a search parameter for choosing titles. The company must maintain a given threshold of acceptability, as well as a delineation of “Alpha”, “Beta” and “Release” offerings/servers and time associated with them before they are dropped from the stack. The idea here is that if a designer uploads an offering, it has to meet either acceptability (player community) standards or performance (usage) standards or it will be dropped from the stack.

Do you think that these player designers can create offerings that 50,000 people will play? A few will, the majority will not. Analysis of game communities, guilds and so forth show clearly that a player will generally interact with a few dozen other players on a semi-regular basis. Huge servers with tens of thousands of players are a product of static product based offerings. This service concept promotes many smaller game worlds played on more standard servers. This lowers the cap of the game world player population, and allows less expensive systems to run the servers. It also promotes an encapsulation of the niche markets that would never see mainstream release as only several thousand people would ever play the game.

Who else is doing this? Who are your direct competitors? There are two other company’s that have tried this to date, and they were unsuccessful in their offering in that they had to modify their business plan and work in different ways to stay in business. Both tried to aim at the low end developer instead of the high end player. Both offered a standard interface, but only half the infrastructure. In short, they offered to be the general infrastructure of the MMORPG and gave toolsets, and provide a billing structure. They did not provide art assets (the largest barrier to entry for writers and storytellers and game designers), they did not provide a service model that benefited both the player and the designer. In short they tried to market a service to game developers that provided a marginal value that saved them effort in the short term, but was not a value in the long term.

What makes this different from other on-line games? It is all about the player, and reaching the right market and providing value. Players now spend $15.00 a month (give or take a few dollars), to play a single offering. Compare this to $15.00 a month to have the opportunity to play dozens, or even hundreds of games per month. The value greatly overshadows traditional product based offerings. Besides this, by utilizing the dynamic game environment aspects of this service offering, the designers can offering something now that is completely missing from other traditional titles. That is meaning. The players now have ways to interact with the game world that changes the game world. This will bring back a very large portion of gamers who have stopped playing these types of games because they realized that what they had no point, no value to other people or to themselves and had no meaning. Nothing ever changed.

How do you compete against other large offerings such as WOW?
The model that the product based offerings such as WOW provides are not sustainable. They will fail. They are forced to create a content pipeline and that content is consumed at an ever-increasing rate. You hear stories of people taking time off from work for a two-weeks when a new “add-on” is released and then finishing it in days. Then they face 18 months for the next release, and they will only do this a few times before they “drift” to another offering.

Another large portion of players play WOW for the social interaction with their real life friends. Consensus is high that the game is weak and they tolerate it because their friends play. Yet, WOW yields very few tools in the game that help strengthen and maintain these bonds.

The Game Publishing Service approach solves both of these issues and generates additional benefits as well.

Content: This is perhaps the largest advantage that the Game Publishing Service approach gives. Not only does it create a platform where thousands of offerings can be maintained, these offerings often will create much their own content dynamically. Meaning that the players can create the “situation” of their game word or scenario, and generate the possibilities of what may happen, but most of the time and effort of the game offering is generated by itself. Further, the individual designers and developers will guide the theme and provide additional content with it is needed.

Players: The strong hooks into the game system itself which is part of the tool kit and publishing service can give guilds reasons to band together and perform specific tasks in the various game simulations. In short, it helps give meaning and shared purpose which is non-existent in 99% of the game offerings out there today. This can perhaps be better illustrated in the following manner. Imagine that we have a group of teenagers that go down to the local park and hang out. They don’t do anything in particular, but just socialize, hang out and occasionally perform shared activities that help one member or another. They can hang out at this park, another park, the mall or at one of their houses and have the same effect. Now imagine that when they are at the park, they are a team that has a shared goal. They discuss strategy, are, as a group, competitive against other groups and pay attention to each other, how they are equipped, what they wear how they do certain tasks as all of these are factors to be successful in the park. In short, they not only socialize, but depend upon each other in a larger shared context. The richness of the social interaction is greatly increased. They have meaning and reason to be in the park as opposed to somewhere else.

More soon..

Jim

The 56th hour

There are many things that would like to discuss and share with you. Right now I am involved with a project as discussed earlier, taking some of this theory and putting it into practice to give folks, like yourself, a practical example of what I have been pondering.

Fifty six hours ago I released the Mod to Mount&Blade. At this moment, over 2500 folks have downloaded and are playing it. There is a nice thread on the Mount&Blades forum where there is some great feedback, and more positive and supportive than I could have hoped for.

This is the heavy support phase after a release where all those little bugs that slipped through QA are addressed. I will be in this mode for around a week, then start to work on the next iteration of this project.

There is a fine line here that needs to be acknowledged. While there are some things that I want to deliver to the community that further my own goals, which are part entertainment and part real world demonstration of some of these concepts we discuss on this Blog. As a product marketing manager, it is essential that the community of players be engaged to help drive future features and that the process be as transparent as possible.

One thing I have learned that is a key point. Once you release a product, any product, to a group of people, you no longer control that product. To be successful, the community of consumers must provide the fuel that is transformed by the development team into results to get the product from point A, to point B.

In saying this, we have to acknowledge that this MOD for Mount&Blade is a product, not a service. The whole Mount&Blade business model is predicated on a product orientation, and a MOD, such as Prophesy of Pendor, and many others are just that.. modifications applicable to a product to increase the staying power and revenues of the product offering.

The problem with this approach is that it is not sustainable. You will note that many of the earlier pioneers of the community are no longer with us. They have moved on. There are many reasons for this, but the primary one is that real world life requires time and effort. This type of hobby is extremely time consuming and often to engage at this level is at the detriment of aspects of real life. They had to make a choice, as everyone who mods will eventually make a choice, to continue with their hobby or to pursue real world dollars that solve real world problems.

This is one of the primary reasons I am such an advocate of the game service platform approach as I shared with you folks several posts ago. If this activity paid a modder based upon the the time spent by players playing their creations then you would have much higher quality offerings that were really engaging, and focused on exactly what the players wanted. Further, it would allow modders to make a living or supplement their income which would solve real world problems and they would not need to move on. If you have not read that post.. take a look.

So, you may ask why am I modding? I have the desire to create, as many artists, writers and modders do. But more importantly, right now in these difficult enconomic times, I am between jobs and I have ample time to put into this endevor. The result I hope will be a win-win for all of us.

Peace out.. and I will post more soon.

Jim

Why I like Chaos Theory

What is chaos theory?

A very high level scientific explanation can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

Many years ago I went to an art exhibit where the artist had created elaborate fractal art by extrapolating mathematical functions found in chaos theory.

It fascinated me and I began thinking about how to use that concept in game design. I altered my thinking and how I was designing Legends and implemented something that when it was finished, completely surprised me.

What I had done was to create the game map, but not exactly what was ON the map, but a series of overlapping templates of what COULD be on the map taken from different perspectives. The overlays I chose were “RACE”, and “DENSITY”.

“RACE” was an overlay that gave me a geopolitical overview of a fantasy world. I could paint an area and say “This is controlled by the Elves”, or this other area was dominated by “Human Barbarian Tribes”. The racial templates referred back to a probability table that I created to determine the chance of “What” would be there. For example Elves would contain 85% High Elves, 5% Half elves, 5% Fairies, and 5% Wood Elves.

“DENSITY” was what sort of things I expected to see there in terms of structure. Was this a wilderness area, or perhaps a rural area or even the interior of a Kingdom. Each choice referred back to a probability table that I created to determine chances of certain things occurring. For example a template called “Interior” would have say a 40% chance of a village, a 40% chance of a castle or keep, and a 15% of a town, and a 5% chance of a city. Density also had a variable to determine how MANY of these “Places of Interest” would occur.

I had a handful of “Absolute” things that I needed to place in the game world, main cities, key ruins, characters etc. But those were done on another template that just connected them to the game map.

When I generated the game map based upon the “Probability Painting” I had done, the results were both very interesting and very surprising.

First, it worked perfectly. There were things in the game now that sparked my imagination and it was delightful to try to understand and create “Meaning” from looking at the game map. And to my surprise, meaning came. I knew it was random, and had no meaning, but by the places created one could surmise the relationship to other places that were nearby. An Orc Castle close to an Elven village of course meant that those Elves were at risk from raids by the Orcs. I did not plan that, but it was there in front of me. It was almost like reading a novel as you just knew that certain things were going go happen in the game based upon the proximity of the these places of interest.

I tried it again and to my amazement, it painted exactly the same thing again. At first I thought there was something wrong with my code, but then I discovered the key that makes this whole thing really exciting. What I found was that if I could seed the randomization process with any particular number, based upon the number used, I could randomize EXACTLY THE SAME PLACES.

I did some testing and to my amazement I found that at this time at least, and I qualify this statement, as it has been over 15 years since I ran these tests, the results were machine independent. If I send the routine that generated numbers to my friends in England, Austria, and Australia, and they ran the tests, we all came out with exactly the same random numbers in the same sequence based upon the same random seeds.

So, you ask why this is important? Let me tell you what this means in business terms. When we design a game it takes a great amount of effort to create content. Thousands of hours, and millions of dollars paying level designers, artists, and so on to sit at their computers and come up with interesting content to be consumed by the players.

What if rather than creating something “Explicitly”, we create the “Rules and boundaries” of what is “POSSIBLE” then let the computer generate the details?

To give you a sense of scope here, this process can be for all practical purposes, infinite. Infinite is a big number, in fact, it is not conceivable by our minds, and so we have to use abstract terms to understand it. Lets move this down to numbers we can comprehend easily.

An example is in order. Imagine that we want to create a small galaxy, only twenty thousand stars and let the players explore and colonize this micro-galaxy. Most 4^th generation games that deal with space exploration cannot handle more than a few hundred worlds, much less twenty thousand. We also want this to be not a stand-alone game, but a MMORPG just to make it interesting.

I desire to create content, that gets down to the cubic yard on these planets, asteroids, and moons. How would I do this? The raw amount of data it would take using traditional design methods would make it impossible. Each world could conceivably be a terabyte in size.

If I gave you, the player, a program that contained the randomization process, all I need do is send to you one single precision number and let the randomization process fill in the rest. The only data I would need to send to you would be what has changed on the world based upon player interference.

So, in this example I just gave, it saves time, money and creates a larger range of possible things for the player to experience.

We use already lower forms of this concept for the randomized processes of “Random encounters” for the generation of NPC’s. in some the games which we play. Yet still, even in this form, the majority of the games out there use static content which is explicitly created.

The difference is that explicit content can be consumed but once. Dynamic content can be consumed over and over again and is what makes it so desirable from a design perspective.

Peace out and happy holidays…

Jim

The Vision

Hello all. I would like to give you a vision in this entry. It will likely last several entries, but that is ok.

The vision I plan to impart a few paragraphs down requires a bit of an introduction. It is a vision of the future of gaming, or at the least how I would like to see the future.

To appreciate what I am about to reveal, you may want to consider the source. I am an old guy, who cut his teeth on gaming just under 40 years ago at age 10 playing boxed war games by Avalon Hill. I picked up “Dungeons & Dragons” when it was advertised in an 1/8^th page ad in Wargamer’s Digest when I was going through a table top gaming phase in 1974. Likely I have (or had) one of the first printings of the 3-booklet set. In 1980 I started a game company (in the wrong location), and developed computer games for the Atari and Apple microcomputers. It unfortunately failed, not because of the game design (it was called Shadow-Hawk I and it was similar to Elite but 5 years earlier), but because we could not release in time and missed the Christmas retail window. In short, we ran out of money and had to fold. During this time I developed a blue-print for the future of gaming and what phases we would have to go through as a company to change with them. I was about 90% right on, the biggest flaw was that the ability for massively multiplayer games in a shared graphical game world came about 5-7 years earlier than I predicted. Later in the mid 1980’s through the early 1990’s I developed turn based multi-player games played by mail. In 1990 I saw the coming of the internet as a death knell for this business, and tried with the help of several programmers to develop real time games played via the internet through a gaming service. There were lots of real world problems that caused this not to be finished (divorce, disease, lead programmer leaving) and in 1994 I left gaming on a professional basis for nearly 10 years. I tried to return in 2003 with what I am about to reveal to you, but with limited success.

The reason this is important is that I have a track record of being ahead of the curve and being able to spot market trends. As I opened this blog, I revealed that likely I will not see the benefits of what I have inside my head. I have spent years researching this concept and documenting a business case for it’s success. It is my sincere hope that this discussion will help the right person at the right time and this vision will, in some form, be given birth for the benefit of all of us.

The future of gaming is not a game. It is a game publishing service. It is based upon the most successful and proven business model utilizing the Internet today. I call that model a “T” based service model and both Amazon and Ebay use it.

It is a service provided by a gaming company that sits between a provider and a consumer and provides immense value BOTH WAYS.

For the Provider: The game company enables the provider to create games using a standardized platform, tools and extensive provided artwork assets. It provides the infrastructure that enables players to sign up, select games they want to play or download, and then keeps track of the time the player spends on what product. Monthly totals are calculated and part of the players subscription fees are paid to the various providers based strictly upon usage. The “Design tools” are free and freely downloaded by anyone and most importantly they are aimed at the high end player, and not the low end developer. The company provides a rating system which is calculated from the actions or the players and organized feedback from the player community that cuts the poor titles from the offering stack.

For the Player: The game company offers a service where you sign up for $15.00 a month. You have access to hundreds if not thousands of titles that you can play any or all, as you desire. New titles are added all the time, some are good, and some are great and the poor ones are dropped from the offering.

From the Company: This solves so many problems in game design. It eliminates the risk issue that publishers have in investing in new titles, as you only pay for titles that are successful. It gives a constant stream of content that is provided by your game designers and providers. The company focuses on marketing the service, providing solid infrastructure, billing service, and creating artwork.

This situation we see ourselves in holistically in the gaming community is very similar to a situation that occurred in history several hundred years ago. It was in Europe where all knowledge and technology was controlled by the church. In order to create books you had to go through years of training in the monasteries, be subject to rigorous standards and do menial copy work before you could even dare hope to write your own book. Even then, it had to be approved. Then came the printing press and the arguments that the clergy had with allowing non-priests to write books. What could they, the untrained and uninitiated possibly write about?

Today this same flavor of issue is before us and it is strangling creativity, and stopping a renaissance in gaming. The ideas are out there, the writers, storytellers, and novelists abound. What stops them from producing games? They are not trained, are not closely tied to the industry. In order to bring their artistic imaginations alive and be free to create, they have to do years of base work and support business minded people to make money. In short, we stifle creativity for the sake of profit. Yet ironically it is that very creativity that generates profit in the first place. What I am doing as a Modder with Mount&Blade clearly should illustrate that there is talent available out there that can provide professional looking and engaging products. I am not alone.

Some of the market research that I have done shows that there are thousands and even tens of thousands of people who would love the opportunity to create offerings on this system. Just look at what has been done with the games that have decent modding tools out there. Look at Neverwinter Nights who after 5 years after release is still a growing community! Statistically speaking there are hundreds of people who would excel, and a dozen who would be at the J.K. Rowling level at creating gaming products through a service as I described. In addition, there are millions of people who would jump at the chance to play this service, as it would provide immense value for their dollar.

This is the vision. A place where a college student can spend a summer vacation and create an offering that serves as a part time job through the school year. It is a place where a housewife can create a vision of gaming, by women for women when her kids are at school. It is a place where the creative novelists can express their thoughts, ideas and stories in a new medium. It is a place where the creative do what they do best: Create, and the best is consumed and enjoyed by the player community and the company who provides the service takes no risks. It is a vision where hundreds of jobs are created. It is a vision of leadership: Where we enable those who have the talent to succeed with their passion.

Peace out and more later.

Jim

Return to Gaming

Hello there folks, sorry I have been absent over the last several months. Last summer the company I worked for radically downsized (laid off 60% of its work force) of which I was one. Looking for work in this economic environment is not a fun experience.

It has taken most of my waking hours up to about three weeks ago when I decided to get back into gaming. The holiday season is accompanied by hiring freezes in the B2B software sector where I have been employed for the last 10 years. So I decided to try my hand at modding. One of my favorite titles is Mount&Blade, as mentioned earlier and it was a natural choice to explore what was possible.

I think that I have missed my natural calling. A friend once told me that I have a soul of an artist. I doubted that for years, but after these last few weeks, I think perhaps she was right. What was most amazing to me was that working on this project energized me and allowed me to work 12 hours a day and still be refreshed and excited over the work I was doing. While it will never be paid, the chance to express ideas and concepts in this medium has been an enlightening experience.

In this case I have been able to give an example of the entertainment convergence I have been talking about for years. As I write this, the module is 90% completed, only some presentation pieces need to be done and some minor tweaks for a release this weekend. Overall, I am pleased and excited.

So.. I will list the intro here for others to read..

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Prophesy of Pendor

Introduction

The hospice hallway was dimmed and there was lingering smell of bleach as I walked down towards Vance’s room. I knew that he was dying and the summons I received from his sister meant that the end was near. It had been a long year and Vance, my friend since college, had struggled with and will finally succumb to, the cancer that he was diagnosed with last Christmas. What a lousy year this had been.

I knocked at the door and entered, pulling the linen drapes aside I saw that he was lying in one of those high end hospital beds, a bright red blanket up to his chest and an IV drip was attached to his left hand. I knew it was morphine. He looked gaunt and tired, his hair was uncombed and he had a pale look to him. Not just pale, but worn, almost translucent. He smiled as I entered.

“Hello champ how goes it?” I bantered as I sat down in the chair closest to the bed.

“Hey! I have been waiting for you slacker.” He said in a strained voice, barely above a whisper. “How am I? I’ve been better.” A small mischievous smile crept across his face. “You see that hot nurse out there? Too bad she’s taken. I can’t talk her out of dumping her fiancée and running off with me to Tahiti.” His smile ended in a slight grimace and a spasmodic cough. “Sorry, the morphine is still kicking in. The pain is not fun.” He said. There was a moment pause where we just looked at each other. Memories flooded me, the times we had shared, and a sense of what this man meant to me as my friend. Dam few friends these days to lose any more, especially ones that were so important.

Seeming to sense my mood, Vance smiled, “I still think you should have bought the Jag.” I laughed as my mind flashed back to a time when I could have bought my dream car for a song. I procrastinated and it was sold out underneath me before I mustered the guts to sign on the dotted line. Vance said that I was a fool and went to some pains to remind me of his ignored advice for going on twenty years now. Never of course, in front of my wife, but when we were alone, it was almost a mantra. Twenty years? Yes, I recounted them; I had known this man as my friend over half my life.

“I have something for you.” He said and he motioned to the table next to him. There was what looked to be a large stationary box. “Open it.” he said.

I reached over and grabbed the box. It was much heavier than I had anticipated and brought to my lap where I carefully opened it. Inside was what looked to be a typed manuscript.

“I have been working on this for a long time”, he said, “and now I want you to have it.” He paused as I took a moment and inspected the pages, several hundred, neatly typed. This surprised me, as I had no inkling that Vance was a writer.

“I don’t understand” I said, unable to contain my confusion.

He smiled, and said, “Read the introduction.” He then closed his eyes and sighed, “I will just take a short nap here while you do. Wake me if that hot nurse comes in. I have to work in her some more.”

I smiled then turned my attention to the box in my lap. The introduction was twenty pages long, talking about of all things, the nature of the universe. Specifically how there are infinite variations of reality played out in alternate dimensions and explained fairly well under the general term of Quantum Physics. It went on to cite references and theories and wove an intricate argument of how every story, every act of artistic creation was a momentary breach between these infinite dimensions bringing that “reality” back into out own. Every story, every novel, every “fantasy world” was in fact, in some other alternate dimension and therefore real. It ended with a question in that do we really pull this stuff from alternate dimensions, or by the act of inspiration do we cause its existence? Do we create infinite universes by our acts of creativity and storytelling?

I looked up maybe twenty minutes later to see Vance watching me. He smiled and whispered, “Keep reading.” then shut his eyes again.

I looked down at Chapter One, and I started reading about the history of this medieval fantasy kingdom: Pendor.

Almost a Millennium ago

The war of the Titans laid the foundation for the ascension of Man. A terrible war, between ancient elder races left the world stripped of magic, and those magnificent mythical people, once so powerful, were now only the stuff of folklore and legends. Only the reclusive Noldor, what since “The Lord of the Rings”, we call “Elves” remain from those times, and their once great cities are all destroyed save perhaps one.

Three hundred years ago – the Founding of Pendor.

It is the time of Man. The story centers on the fertile lands of Pendor and the struggles of the peoples, their leaders and their destiny. Several hundred years ago, a single Kingdom was forged by sword and fire. A peace was maintained and prosperity came to the kingdom and it flourished. Five generations of Pendorian Kings sat on the Silver Throne in Sarleon and for nearly two hundred years they guided the destiny of their land and it’s subjects.

From the Founding of Pendor – the year is 198

The downfall of the Kingdom was as swift as it was and vile. A single month, thirty days, and the empire was in tatters. The irony was it was not by the sword in battle, nor by some dark magic that caused the deaths of the King and his family. But by an unseen killer, a disease, the red plague that ravaged the land and cut down the peoples of the Kingdom, great and small, like an assassin in the night.

The royal family had perished, and there was no King to rule the land. Then came the invasions that seemed to shatter the once proud kingdom into slivers and the glory that was once the Kingdom of Pendor, was now itself the stuff of legend.

With the death of the King and his heirs, there was chaos. Multiple lords laid claim to the throne and nearly every noble of the land began squabbling over succession.

From the Founding of Pendor – the year is 199

The carefully laid agreements, truces and alliances with neighboring powers became suspect. In the North, the mountain tribesmen began raiding the heartlands of Pendor. Embolden by their success and the lack of response from the Knights of the Realm, they struck even deeper and soon this led to the siege to Rane. The Earl of Rane sought help from the nobles of the land, but the schemes of the powerful found reasons not to come to his aid. Many Northern Lords, banded together and formed a small army that marched to defend the city from the onslaught of the northern Mystmountain warriors.. The battle was bloody and fierce, and in the end, the siege was lifted, and the barbarian tribesmen and their shaman leaders, routed back to their mountain homes. The Northern Lords, who fought so valiantly that day, decided to establish a knighthood order, the Order of the Dragon, comprised of the valiant warriors who defended the city. News of this new order was not well received by other knighthood orders or by the nobility to the South. They demanded that the Order of the Dragon be disbanded which in the minds of the proud warriors of the North, was an unforgivable insult to their valor. The scorn of other established knighthood and the lack of support to route the invaders from Rane prompted the Northern Lords to break ties with the southern lords and declared themselves an independent Kingdom: The Kingdom of Ravenstern.

Reeling from the succession of the Northern cities and lords, the remaining Pendorian nobility were not prepared to meet the next challenge that followed within a few short years.

From the Founding of Pendor – the year is 202

From the South, over the southern sea, the great Baccus empire launched an invasion fleet and landed a powerful army on the shores of Pendor led by the war hardened General Oasar. He drove inland conquering cities and castles, and seemed unstoppable. Ironically, within a few short months of campaigning, the general received by messenger that the great Baccus Empire itself was in civil war and that the Emperor had been assassinated. After receiving this shocking news, Oasar established himself, with the support of several Pendor Lords, as Overlord of Janos and officially broke away from what was left of the Baccus Empire. The great Baccus Empire convoluted and fragmented into dozens of principalities, city-states and kingdoms. The greatest and most powerful is the under the dominion of the priesthood of the serpent: a powerful and seemingly mystical religion of warrior priests who worship the unnamed goddess of darkness who manifests herself in the form of a snake.

For the once great kingdom of Pendor, that meant that a large portion of it’s Southern lands, cities and nobility were now either dead or sworn to service under this upstart general who calls himself Overlord.

From the Founding of Pendor – the year is 204

After the establishment of the Northern Kingdom of Ravenstern and the invasion of Oasar, the powerful Lord Alfred, Duke of Sarleon, consolidated the remaining lords of Pendor and declared himself King of Sarleon. For ten years a measure of peace was maintained.

From the Founding of Pendor – the year is 213

To the far north, across the seas lived the hearty warriors of the Vanskerry. Segmented into Jarldoms, they were raiders and traders. With the Baccus Empire gone, many of the Vanskerry mercenaries in their employ were free to return home to the frosty shores of their fathers. A wise man’s musings in the reaches of Vanskerry goes “Death is found in the blade of your enemy and trouble when a warrior has nothing to do.” When word came to the North of the troubles of Pendor, it was greeted with a call to arms and promises of plunder and women. Soon, raiding ships found the shores of Pendor a ripe land full of gold and wealth. Their well-armed and hearty warriors began raided the towns and villages along the coast and met very little resistance. The Knights of the Lion and Lords of Sarleon responded by patrolling the coastal shores. Yet, still the crafty Vanskerry raiders managed to sack village after village. With so little ability to defend themselves, the merchant lords of the Pendorian coastal provinces sent delegations to the Jarldoms to seek alliances and protection. At first they were rejected, but in time as offers included titles and lands many Jarls and their huscarls began to listen. The lands of Vanskerry are rugged and cold, compared with the lush and rich pastures of Pendor. The lure of good weather, and the chance to become a Lord of a castle, or even a well-located mayor of a village, appealed to many of the Jarls. Soon, many Vanskerry households left the shores of their fathers and sought fortune and prosperity along the coast of Pendor. Some entered into the service of the Pendorian lords, others married into the noble families. This changed many things in the Kingdom, as the warrior culture and attitudes of Vanskerry were brought into the noble houses of the coastal lords. Within a generation the culture gap was so great that the coastal nobles broke away from the King of Sarleon and formed a rough alliance of city-states called collectively the Fierdsvain.

From the Founding of Pendor – the year is 204 to 245

The story continued and detailed intrigues, war and heroic actions as well as the great villains of the land. There were stories of the Jatu tribesmen and their flight from the Empire and General Oasar, becoming nomads in the Eastern prairies of Pendor. There are the detailed accounts of the Order of the Lion, a knighthood order of Pendor, and their history and their betrayal by one of their own which had the order declared outlaw for years until their redemption under the current King of Sarleon. Chapters were dedicated to the D’Shar, a nomadic peoples who are evolving into a military and economic force only to find that their own worst enemy is themselves. Just as fascinating was the references to the encounters with the ancient Noldor and their powerful weapons and enchantments that changed the life of more than one adventurer. I was especially drawn to the story of Madigan, a wandering mystic who prophesized the coming of a hero who would unite the lords of the Pendor and reunite the old kingdom. His saga touched me as a hero himself, trying to speak the truth and being condemned to death for his beliefs.

I was startled out of my reading by the nurse telling me that visiting hours were over. It was late, and I had spent most of the afternoon and early evening captured by the amazing story I held in my hands. I skipped quickly to the last pages and found them blank. I realized suddenly that the final chapters were missing.

I looked at Vance, who once again was awake, and watching me.

Guessing my question and concern he said, “I do not have the answer to the last chapters. Those will have to be written. Perhaps when you write them, it will create those dimensions, those realities. I do not know for sure, but I suspect that is the case. I am too tired now to continue. That is why I asked you here today mate. Finish the story.”

He reached over and took my hand and gave it a hard squeeze. “I am tired mate and I have to sleep” he said in a half dreamy voice. It was the morphine I knew, finally giving him relief to the awful pain he must be feeling. I smiled at him and he shut his eyes and went to sleep.

This module is created as the stage to write the end of this story. You play the Hero or Heroine who fulfills the Prophecies of Madigan, and becomes the champion who brings forth the lost glory of the Kingdom of Pendor.

Let me know how it turns out…

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You can get the game and module from Mount&Blade . It will be released December 17th, 2008.

More updates sooner than later..

Response to commentor II - Life balance as a gamer.

Comment from a reader ------------------
I just came across your blog after reading a post you made on the M&B forums -- I like the ideas that you propose.

I've been toying with the idea of game design for awhile, and have plenty of "ideas" about what makes an ideal game. I won't share those now though.


My point for this comment is as follows: my wife hates it when I play games. She doesn't understand that since the age of 6, I've been playing games starting with an Atari 2600, C64, IBM PC, nintendo, up to the current generation of PC games. Like yourself, I (used to) plow through a large number of games, search for nuggets of ingenuity and true skill. Now I am "not allowed" to purchase more than 1 game per year, even that's a struggle

So my question for you is how does your wife react to your gaming? How can I get my wife to understand it's something important to me? Given her dislike of me playing games, I don't think there's any way she'd support me creating a game (which is a significant time and money investment!).

p.s., I'd also like to mention the game "Dwarf Fortress" to you -- (www.bay12games.com). At first glance it looks very roguelike, with ascii-like graphics, but the mechanics and gameplay are really what shines for me. The learning curve is a little bit steep, but it's worth the time (and it's free).

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Answer to Comment… life balance as a gamer.

I want to answer your question for a variety of reasons. This is a problem and pain that the majority of adult gamers face. I have faced it in my life and I have had both professional training and some therapy that touched upon this subject.

I want to put forward right now, that this is a very complicated issue and it involves nearly every aspect of our lives. I will try to share with you as best as I can, what I have learned.

Personally, my wife hates gaming. She does not understand it, thinks it is a waste of time. For many years we struggled with a balance between the passion and time that I give to my hobby and her desire for me not to be involved with it.

That last sentence we finally came to understand was the key. Let me explain.

We have three lives; all of us, all the time.

We have our professional life, our family life and our personal life. We are the happiest when they are all in balance. This means that we have the time, energy and resources to dedicate to being successful in each one.

For our professional life, this generally means that we are in a positive work environment and have a good self-esteem with what we are doing and the prospects of the future are prosperous.

In our family life this means that we have the time and money to pay our bills, save for the future, spend time with those we love and nourish the relationships with those whom are closest to us.

Our personal life is what we do for ourselves to nourish ourselves. By this I mean that it is the way in which we grow, understand, create, socialize and ultimately become better people.

Often time, when either our professional life or our personal life does not completely fulfill us, we turn to our personal life to find solace. If you were a drinker, then you hit the pubs more often. If you are reader, you pick up some books to read. If you were an artist, you may bury yourself in your creativity.

Gaming, in all its forms, is a mesh of real life and mathematics. Especially in MMO’s where we interact with other people we have the opportunity to “reinvent” ourselves as guild leaders, or can have various forms of “Power” that can garner respect from other people, that we do not receive in our professional life or even perhaps in our family life. If you look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, often we, as gamers, get those higher order needs from our gaming experiences that we are not getting from real life.

Lets bring this back down out of theory and get it into the practical level.

What my wife and I came to realize: Was that it was not gaming that was the real issue.

Football wives, baseball wives, bowling wives, hockey wives, etc, all have the same problems as gaming wives, and they are steeped in the same root causes.

Our partners need attention and need to feel that they matter, just like we do. Part of the problem is that with gaming, we are visible and are physically present to them, but we are involved with something other than them. Further, the results of this “time” cannot be mapped to something that is benefiting the family directly. You are not making money, building the fence, painting the house, or fixing the car. They see this as competition to their “Family Time”. This is easily interpreted as “I am here, and if I am here and you are here, then I am more important than that computer?” When we spend time on the computer, are not involved with something that is of benefit to the family, and our significant other is present, a conflict arises.

The root problem is about perception and needs.

Now I was lucky in that my wife has some hobbies that she does in the home that I have little or no interaction with. She gets pretty surly when I walk into one of her mystery movies or sit down with her when she is scrapping and start asking questions. Luckily she realized her behaviors and we were able to start a dialogue that mapped the same soft of behaviors in reverse to what she was complaining about with my “games”.

The key here, is balance. My personal success here, is that if my wife needs my attention, or my kids need my attention when I am on the computer, I drop the computer immediately to help them or pay attention to them. I also take lots of breaks where I seek out my partner and engage her (when she is not tied up in her hobbies). This helps reinforce that they are more important than my hobby... and they are, I just have to show it to them.

There are some other aspects here that you have brought up.

One was about spending money to purchase a game and being “Allowed” to purchase a game.

My wife and I pool our money into a central account except for a small “stipend” or allowance each of us receives from our paychecks. This goes into our respective personal accounts and we can do with that money anything we want “With no interference or judgment from the other”.

Each of us must have some level of financial independence from the other to explore and fund our respective “personal” lives. Without it, we become trapped and begin to resent the control that the other has on our lives, which is not healthy for any relationship. Resentment kills the positive regard we have to our spouses, and from what once was love and friendship will eventually turn into either obedience and dislike, or someone will walk away from the relationship all together.

The last point you bring up that I want to address is about creating your own game, or own game company. When you do this, you are married to that game, that concept that company. It is not your mistress, it is your wife. Any business, game related or not, takes a great deal of energy, passion and money to make work. It is a huge investment of time that takes away from other aspects of your life. I am not saying don’t, just that it is all consuming. I remember with Legends when I was in the process of programming it, I took an afternoon out and took my wife to a movie. I distinctly remember the moment when I realized that I was spending too much time working on the game. I was standing in line, chatting with my wife when there was a lull in the conversation. My mind immediately went to a segment of code I was trying to debug and improve and for several minutes I “zoned out” internally running, by memory, each and every line of code for that sub routine. This will happen to you.

The last thing I will impart to you, for better or ill. When you choose your hobby to become your livelihood, you lose something. When your work becomes your play, playing becomes work. When I became professional many years ago, I could not look at a game or title and enjoy it for what it was. It was always some form of competition that I dissected to the nth degree. I had lost what made games important to me… fun.

So mate, I hope that this soliloquy was of some value to you.

Thanks for the tip on Dwarf Fortress.. I will check it out.

Best regards,

Jim

Response to commentor

Thank you for some excellent feedback and viewpoint. It is very insightful and jumps ahead to the goal of what I am trying to accomplish here.

As you can read in my bio, for several years I worked on a project called “Digital Lore” (which created the Lorecrafter Game Publishing System). This project is aimed at bringing forth the concept you mention into reality.

What I plan with this BLOG, is not only to confirm the vision you have mentioned, but to provide the stepping stones on how to achieve that vision, not only from the design standpoint, but from the business standpoint.

For several years I created business plans, design documents and prototypes. I plan to make available that information to facilitate the success of someone who can take this concept forward.

Let me take a minute and describe the real problem.

The design stuff is fairly easy to be honest. All of what you describe has already been designed and all the problems solved.

It is building a sufficient business case and getting in front of the right person that can invest enough to get it started and then subsequently secure additional rounds of investment to bring forth this concept into reality. I will tell you now that from a business perspective, this look really risky. For people who do not have the knowledge that you (the commenter to whom I am primarily addressing) and I have, this seems bewildering. These folks do not talk the same language, to not live with the same understanding. The problem is how do we convince someone, demonstrate to them, four things.

1. That there is a need in the marketplace,
2. That this concept fills that need
3. That we can create development team that can bring that concept into reality.
4. That once created we can market a functional business and run it and be profitable
to give a healthy if not fabulous return on the investment.

Perhaps there is a fifth as well, and I will get into that later.

Just so you know the reality of this project, we are talking between 3 to 4 years of development time from scratch, and at least 20 Million dollars of incremental funding. If we want to add many more millions we can purchase or perhaps partner with some companies that can cut down on development time.

What I will show with this Blog is how to solve the design issues. Then the business model concept and prove how it works. Then the market research that shows the needs in the marketplace. Then talk about companies who are already half way there with their orientation and technology (But may not fully realize their potential).

Thanks for the feedback..and do not give up hope. As a side, David Weber, the originator of Paper Mayhem I am sure would be glad of the comment to his passion.

Jim

Dynamic World

Dynamic Worlds. The holy grail of game design in our time.

Lets start with a thank you to Dr. Paul Sincock. While the ideas and concepts herein are mine, when I shared them with Paul, he was able to refine them and add a great deal of meat to them that solidified these concepts. Thank you Paul for your work and insight.

The next step is a Definition:

Dynamic World:
A game environment that starts in a predetermined state, but then changes of it’s own accord based upon the random actions of the world, the actions and influence of the players upon the environment and the actions and influence of players towards each other.

This is so we know intellectually what we are discussing. Next, lets create a player vision on how this would work.

The Vision:
A game world where the actions of a player or a group of players alters the types of encounters, the feeling, the flavor, the personal abilities, influence, prices etc of the game world. Where what we do as players makes a difference not only to us, but also to other players and guilds and we can and often do, change the environment forever.

Next, lets take a look at the big concepts then work down into details on how this will work.

From a design standpoint we know about spawn points. For investors and others that may not understand this, these are the locations in the virtual world where the various critters that the players fight are created. In most games they are static locations that do not change, and the type and amount of these critters also do not change. From a players perspective they are where the “Orcs spawn” or where those “Skeletons” are located.

Some of this is good. I have seen and believe that it is important for most of these MMORPG’s that there needs to be a “training area” where players can get to know the game, controls, and what they are getting into. After that, is where everyone is having problems and what this concept is aimed at solving.

Now comes the shift in perspective, so pay attention. Lets take that concept of a “spawn point” and make it just that: a generic location where something will spawn. Not something specific, just something that will be determined. So as we look at the game map we see thousands of generic “spawn points”, or predetermined locations where something will spawn. Later we will expound upon this concept, but for now, it is a nice starting place.

The next shift in perspective, and this one is a bit trickier, is that we will employ something called “Spheres of Influence”. In the end, we will have many types of flavors of spheres of influence, but for now since we are human and can only handle a few things in our head at a time, lets keep it simple and temporarily define these spheres of influence as “race”. Spheres of influence literally influences what is possible to really spawn at a spawn point. If the spawn point has multiple spheres of racial influence, then it randomly picks from a probability table (discussed later), what will spawn in that location.

Stop at this point and take a breath. This is the point where some programmers like to tell me that we do not have the technology to do this.

Please consider this interesting concept. Every week or so we must take down our servers for a period of hours to clean up and fine tune them for optimal performance. If we do this on a regular basis, the same time every week then what we have effectively is a measurement of time. A regular measurement of time that we can use as a game “Heartbeat”, where we can review and total the player and game actions and make changes to those spawn points. Imagine that during this time we delve into a database and compute the effective changes and resolve what will spawn during the spheres of influence and modify those very same spheres. Please note something important here. This is all done when the players are OFF-LINE, and behind the scenes. What is done ON-LINE is only capturing counts of when key things are done, such as when a building is constructed, a key NPC killed, or one of a thousand different actions that can modify (or in some cases, create) a sphere of influence. (I will get much more detailed into this in the following posts.)

So, what the hell does this mean? Lets look at this simple example: Imagine that we have a base race of “Nature”. Nature supports “wolves”, “Deer”, “Mountain Lions”, and “Bear” as spawns. Thus if we had a spawn point and the only influence on it was the racial sphere of influence of “nature”, one of these four (as per this example), types of creatures would spawn.

Then imagine that a player decides to make a nearby Elven village his home and starts to invest in the local economy, or builds a small fortress nearby. The elven village also has a sphere of influence around it and the more things that happen in favor of the village (new buildings, guilds basing themselves here, player positive actions) the stronger the racial sphere of influence of “Elf” will be around the village. When the sphere of influence reaches out to our spawn point as discussed above, then we may see “Elven Hunters”, or “Elven woodcutters” instead of “Wolves”. Note also, that the more things that happen to the Elven village that are negative (such as the guards killed, the buildings burned, civllians killed etc), the less influence it will have. Lets move forward here with the Elven Village growing in influence for our example.

During the “Heartbeat”, we determine what is possible to spawn here, assign relatively strengths to the various spheres of influence, then randomly pick which “Race” will be predominant here, then again, randomly pick what sort of spawn will occur from that influence.

That is the basic concept, now the next several post, we will examine how to make it useable in a dynamic environment. We will be exploring different types of “Spheres of influence”, and different types of “Spawn Points”. Together with a couple of other concepts these will come together and show how a game world can be sustained by creating its own content.

Best,

Jim

Next Step - Product Vs Service.

Thank you to the person who made the comment on July 12, 2008. While I see the log of page hits on the site, the interactivity helps me to keep writing.

There are a few more large design aspects that I want to bring forth and illuminate before I tie all of this up into a package that has astounded every gamer who has had the opportunity to discuss this with me. If you have read to this point, keep checking back and this should all be tied up by mid August.

The next step is talking about what these MMORPG are for the provider. Key point.. these are NOT products. We in the PBM world figured this out 20 years or more ago. Once you have released an offering to the public where they pay a fee on a monthly basis, the offering becomes a Service. Yes, a service with a capital “S”.

The important takeaway is that a service has different deliverables and key points and orientation to the customer than from a product. Stop here. Think about this for a moment. So often we read the words, without savoring the deep meaning. So often I meet folks, both in and out of gaming who pay lip service to this concept, but have not the slightest inkling what this means.

Lets do a little exercise, think of it as a little challenge. Take out a pen and paper and list out three differentiators between a product and a service. Go ahead. Once you have completed this, then please continue reading.

Now that you have put some brain power behind this concept for a few minutes, something should pop out at you.

A product offering is all based upon point of sale. You sell the product, then move on to create “XYZ II”. In the past this has been done with better graphics, different content etc. Key point: You cannot retain subscribers by providing a product. Products are transactional: you buy them then consume them then you are done. Almost all gamed today are created from the perspective of a Product. The prevailing concept is to add more "content" and that somehow makes it a wonderful service!! Bah! If you believe this then you are not thinking.

A service offering is based upon meeting customer needs over a long period of time. The longer you can meet their needs, the longer they will keep with your service. This means that they must have a constant stream of unique challenges, situations, problems to be solved and most importantly “Questions than need to be answered”, and just as importantly, that what they are doing MUST have some form of personal meaning.

“HA!” you say! “I knew that!” Really? If you knew it, and designed with this philosophy, then why are there hundreds of thousands if not millions of posts by gamers around the world begging for designs that incorporate this ideology?

My next entry I will tell you, in detail, how to create a dynamic game environment. Yes we have the technology, Yes it has been put into a prototype, yes it works, and yes, it is amazing. No, no main line game publisher has tripped over this concept successfully yet.

Focus on the Guild

I was reviewing my posts the other day and realized that I am taking too many short-cuts with information in my desire to tell you what I know. The communication is too rich, meaning that I give a sentence of information and expect you to understand the twenty paragraphs of implications behind it. For that I apologize and will try to slow down a bit.

To recap, my thought process runs like this: There mmorpg game itself is repetitive, sometimes story driven for entertainment flavor, has components of finding items, creating a unique avatar (to greater or lesser degrees of success), engaging in the same types of behavior over and over again with little variance. Once you reach the pinnacle (if you can last that long), then you drift to another offering looking for that elusive “something” and you start the process all over again and at least to date, cannot find. Those games that players tend to “stay with” and hang on to, tend to be socially strong in that somehow players bond with other players and create a social network that create psychological ties. It is these ties that keep people together and playing a game, not the game itself.

My contention is that the game can be vastly improved to raise the interest in the simulation so that it does not become repetitive, and that the social networks that keep people in the game can be vastly improved as well.

Today I am focusing on a design element of guild interaction, or the role of player created organizations and how they can be improved. As previously noted we talked about creating the “guild” or player run organization and giving it deep hooks into the game system/simulation itself.

I am playing a small browser based game right now called AstroEmpires, where thousands of players play against each other in a multi-player environment. It is out of Portugal , and it is very simple. I know in real life several people who play and the general consensus is that it is like playing a game with Excel. It is simple, (too simple) has a poorly designed end game, yet… tens of thousands of people play.

Today it dawned on me why. The very topic we are talking about here, the guild, has slightly deeper than normal hooks into the game system and that the players are allowed to be creative with their guild and empire biographies. A strong forum system is in place for the guild, battles against the guild are posted in the combat reports section, there is a forum for news, trade and announcements as well and a large area for the guild owners to be creative and post additional information about what they do and how they do it.

This has the effect of allowing players to effectively band together, communicate, become part of an organization greater than themselves, and act as a larger game entity.

This is the half step in the right direction, and it is a welcome innovation.

Yet this is not enough. The guild structure is still too unstructured, no in-game direct benefits are built into the simulation that facilitate and empower the guild.

The goals would be to create a list of empire and guild bonuses that can be applied either to a single player, or to a guild. Let me give some examples of this line of thought.

Create a formal treaty system that gave bonuses for specific activities, such as a trade treaty, preferred trade partner, Non-Aggression Pacts, Alliances, War etc. The effective “stance” of the guild towards other guilds yield bonuses to player activity.

Create roles inside the guild that were given game bonuses, which in turn can be modified by the guild owners so they can customize their internal structure and provide incentives for member engagement. Roles could then generate in-game events or bonuses based upon their actions. Example: The Guild Leader’s fleets can give a x% bonus (depending on the ability), to offense and defense for guild members who have fleets in the same sector.

In MMORPG speak, this means effective that the Guild provides the player members special in-game abilities that are made available to members at the discretion of the guild leaders. Imagine for example that a guild has attained a 10% combat bonus in melee combat. The leaders can associate that special ability to various titles they have created for their guild. This gives the leaders tools to entice player members to perform specific activities to the benefit of the guild.

This should be a no-brainer. We are empowering the key players in the game (guild leaders), to help keep interest high in the game by giving them the tools to be successful with the simulation. More later.