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.

Why do people Play Games..

It has been put forth that the main difference between man and animal, is that man is better at adapting to his environment and that man strives to make sense of his actions in some greater context other than himself. There are many studies under the heading of sociology, philosophy, and psychology that help define personal and cultural needs in the desire to understand the meaning and context of mans actions. There are more works on this subject than can fill several libraries. One important set of works are the studies by Carl Jung that despite culture, there are a handful of universal archetypes that prevail across cultural barriers that manifest themselves in literature, lore and religion. Another aspect of this puzzle rests in the fact that there are underlying needs that people have that are filled by actively or passively engaging in recreational activity of this nature.

These needs can be broken down into several distinct categories and are the same measures to determine behavior in the workplace. These needs interrelate among themselves and those activities which promote the widest breadth of these factors have the widest appeal to the consumer market.

Achievement: This axis relates to the recognition of work and awards for performance. The rewards and recognition are almost always intrinsic.

Power: This axis relates to the ability to be safe. Power is power over your environment and with that power, the ability to meet challenges that threaten safety.

Acceptance: This axis relates to the ability to socialize with other people and gain a measure of acceptance and a sense of self worth.

People learn and adapt either by their own actions or by watching others perform actions. Literature in the form of books, plays, stage, television and films offer a passive approach to gaining experience. We all watch these forms of entertainment and gain insight into how other people under interesting situations cope and deal with problems. I am not diminishing the artistic aspects of these endeavors, just brining up the underlying psychological needs that are being played upon when we engage in such activity.

Many of these forms of entertainment are social in nature, watched or consumed with a group of friends or peers together or individually. After the event, we often engage in behaviors that reinforce the perceptions from the experience. This re-living of the events are highly social in nature In western culture the social aspects of these shared experiences are widely embraced by females of our society. The social aspect of entertainment and shared activity is on the whole, generally more important to females than the power or achievement aspects.

Western Men on the other hand, are generally more interested in western culture for either the power or achievement aspects. The younger the male, the more power is of importance as the need to “Prove” oneself is a forefront of thought.

These observations should be understood to be group averages and behavior, and not necessarily applied as a hard and fast rule to a single individual. Every aspect at one time or another will play an important role for a single person. Also regardless of gender or culture, there will be people who outside of the norm. There will be young males who are more interested in the social aspects of play, and there will be females who will exhibit the need for achievement or power over the social aspects. Many of these concepts have been brought forth and discussed in minute detail by academic thought leaders in this field. Please reference http://terranova.blogs.com/. For much more detailed analysis of this topic.

Now, this has been an interesting diatribe in academic understanding. How does that translate to designs and how does it solve our problems?

In short, we play for the experience. When the experience becomes redundant, repetitive, and “Been there done that”, we lose interest. In other words killing 3rd level Rats is the same as killing 30th level Desert Rats, we cease learning. There is no “Unanswered Question” or alternative method or information to gain. However, there is a big BUT. If we have made social contacts in the virtual world, and those social contacts provide us value then we will find ways to stay with the simulation until such time as the value for the social interaction falls below the threshold of acceptance. In other words, the boredom of doing the same things over and over again exceeds the value we gain from the interaction with the social group.

I believe that we can keep the virtual world from becoming boring or redundant, and at the same time strengthen the social bonds that exist.

The question again is: How?

The first part is accomplished with a true dynamic game environment. Imagine a virtual world where what we encounter and deal with is determined in part or in whole by the actions of other players against the simulation. It changes and creates it own content as part of the simulation. It never stays the same, and morphs constantly providing new challenges and new situations. I will say now that this has already been done in test environments just to put the nay sayers who believe that the technology does not exist for this concept, at east. I will get to this in great detail in future posts.

The second part is accomplished by taking the “clan” or “Guild” ie.. the player run organization and plant it deeply into the game simulation itself. Expand this where the player run organization is part of the game. Think of this as a shared character class. Imagine a Fantasy type virtual world, where the guild created by the players have special abilities and game bonuses that are given to the players who are members. Imagine then that these abilities are purchased or created by various players based upon actions that are relevant for their individual level. For example, imagine that we accumulate “Guild Points” for lack of a better term, by fulfilling quests or defeating NPC’s (MOBS). One point for a single similar leveled character. If a character defeats a NPC of lower or greater than 2 levels, then nothing is gained. Thus a 3rd level character can generate the same amount of “Guild points” as an elite 80th level character. The contribution to the Guild to purchase and maintain it’s bonuses are the same.

Suddenly, we now have parity between the casual gamer and the hard core gamer, where they can become relevant to each other. This strengthens the bonds and social ties as everyone is now working towards a greater goal that helps everyone in the guild directly.

This also now does something very interesting. It creates a true Multi-player experience, instead of a single player experience set against a static setting with other single players.

Next post will expand upon this concept greatly.

The Problems to be solved.

You may be wondering what all this history, and perspective has to do with solving the problems of the MMORPG’s. Well, to be blunt, unless you are ready to ask the right questions, the answer is meaningless and will create more confusion in the already noise ridden confusion of this industry. We must set the basis of understanding and bring forth all the factors that play into the formation of the question. Please bear with my dialogue, and in the end it will be worth your time.

So, to some meat: What are the problems?

Actually it is one problem, and what follows is a dissection and inspection of the same problem from a variety of viewpoints.

The problem is from four perspectives

Investor Problem Statement: How can I invest in a game company, get stellar return on investment, and reduce substantially the risks associated with these types of ventures.

Producer Problem Statement: How can we create an entertainment offering that will keep millions of customers paying every month to participate for a period of many years, in a cost effective method that does not tie up full development teams and associated costs?

Designer Problem Statement: How can I design a game that will keep players playing?

Customer Problem Statement: Where can I go to play a great game, never get tired of it, provide constant challenge, and that does not adversely affect my real life in terms of personal relationships and responsibilities.