Scott Hartsman - Off the Record

 I do have a couple things that I’ve been wanting to post. The last month or so has been a lot of back-to-back-to-back travel. About halfway done. I’ll try to get them out here while on the road.

In the meanwhile, a sign that I may have spent some part of the last few years losing touch with reality:

We have a pretty nice looking Dodge-somethingorother rental car up here.  Nothing extravagant, just enough to get from point A to B a few times this week.

Revelation while parking it earlier:  I didn’t even know they made cars without power locks anymore.

My main computer died about a week ago, which is the reason for the lack of posting. For the record, it’s a Dell.

I’ve been using them for hardware fairly exclusively over the past ten years, ever since switching from Gateway back in the late ’90s.

At the moment, the building that I’m in has no fewer than eight systems with Dell logos on them. The last startup that I did was also Dell-powered, as was the last large-company job that I had.

In dealing with a number of large technology companies over the past years, a predictable pattern emerges:

1. If they consistently do well by me, I eventually become a huge fan of whatever service it is they’re providing. Back in the early Gateway days, I even had a Gateway-gamers community help mini-site that I ran on the side. (Hey, everyone needs a hobby.)

2. As do many other people. The company succeeds and ends up expanding considerably. Fans rejoice.

3. As a result, they end up needing to do That Thing They’re Good At on a much larger scale.

4. Eventually, they grow so large to where they can leverage their dominance by exploring new ways of maximizing shareholder value. Tragically, most choose to do so in ways that are harmful to consumers:

• incomprehensible telephone contact systems
• gimmicky partnerships that have a net negative effect on the customer
• decreasing value of warranty support
• lower overall quality of company support (never the fault of the people who actually talk to customers for a living - these people generally deserve unfailing politeness, regardless of how poor/frustrating the overall experience becomes - It’s the organization that’s failing them as well, hence this article’s title)
• shipping used products and components to unwary or unknowing consumers
• comically bad upsells
  • I just gave you a chunk of money for a warranty extension and am paying you another chunk of money for a replacement part that will arrive in worse shape than the one I’m replacing. It has taken me three hours and seven department transfers to do so.
  • No, I do not wish to buy a new stick of RAM, a larger hard disk, or upgrade to Vista right now. (At least we both found it hilarious that you had to ask those questions.)

5. People still use said service, but do so more out of habit, until Something happens that incenses them enough to find a replacement

• (Wonder what that could be…)

6. People find a new service to replace the old one, and the cycle continues.

Extending it out past technology, is this the fate of all organizations that have “won” their corner of the game?

I don’t think it has to be, but it seems to be a common sign of anyone operating a large scale business in the 21st century who has wholly failed to transition from a product company to a service company.

If I had one thing to say to any of them, in any industry, it would be this.

• Your product is, or will become, a commodity. It’s the service, stupid.

After having Dell screw up the fourth thing with regards to this particular repair, it occured to me that I’m at the same point with them that I was at with Gateway so many years ago.

Dear Dell,

Glad I could help make you a huge success in whatever microscopic way that I was able to. I did thoroughly enjoy evangelizing some of the cooler things you’ve done over the past years. Alas, it’s time we went our separate ways.

It’s not me — It’s you.

- Scott

Any suggestions for where to go next? Is anyone happy with the systems they buy, or are we down to buy-from-the-hugest, or build-it-yourself as the only remaining options?

Mac folks: I promise that I will try one just as soon as they give me the option to press keys like Alt-F to activate the File menu, and have accelerator support built in by default, or at least as something I can enable, system-wide. To some of us, saving files is hardwired as: Alt-F, S, and so on.

(Yes, my Mac-converted friends all laugh at me for this. You are more than welcome join them in doing so in the comments below.)

Adam Martin helpfully and subtly pointed out that the RSS feed from this site is only showing summaries of the posts when viewed in certain readers or when viewed raw by Firefox.

Sites that use “click here to read the rest” get on my nerves, too.

I’d only ever proofed it in Sage before. Bluntly, I didn’t even know the “/feed” url existed.

(This is the kind of professional blogger I am: I unpack a tarball, assume that Wordpress isn’t actually using my host to support terrorism,  periodically pound my head into the keyboard, and every three months accidentally hit the Publish button bringing you the valuable content that you see before you now.)

For the elite six of you who read this: Let me know if it’s broken or not for your reader - Happy to look into fixing it if it’s annoying anyone.

Over the years I’ve had a few friends begin to learn programming. Occasionally, one of them will find me for help.

I can tell whenever one of them starts out in their first C++ classes, because I start getting asked questions about iostreams, and the questions are almost always about use of esoteric manipulators.

People are intimidated that they’re never going to be able to understand all of the arcane complexities of this built-in system that’s taught to them on day one, which they assume their future livelihood may depend on.

A line and a half of code from one of our servers jumped out at me just now.

They’re reasonably indicative of all of the professionally-created C++ projects I’ve ever worked around.

Here you go:

    // iostreams can suck it
    FILE* fp = fopen( ...

To anyone who asks in the future: You’re safe, guys. Just make it through the class.

…and got a number of truly terrible grades, while at the same time learning programming on my own and succeeding.

The motive to do that? Tearing apart and tweaking with computer games.

via MetaFilter: A Mathematician’s Lament

“…if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done — I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.”

The .pdf in the giant link is long, but the story on its first page is worth a read in itself. I bet it rings profoundly true with more than just me.

I eventually did enjoy math. But as in the story, that came much later in college. The enjoyment definitely occurred despite all of my previous education — Not because of it.

PowerPoint deserves its own private little roped-off area of hell, right next to Project.

If you enjoy playing MMOs, there’s a potential future in which you shouldn’t want to, either.

Another one of the more interesting sessions at IMGDC was (coincidentally) also put on by Dr. Bartle: “Government Interference: How much [pain] can you take?”

The session presented a number of hypothetical situations, some more potentially possible than others, aimed at finding out at exactly what levels of “involvement” would cause us to make the call to just plain throw in the towel.

His initial posting is linked below and my reply is inlined.

Link: TerraNova: The Point Of No Return

This was a great talk. Scary, but an interesting (I hope) intellectual exercise.

MMO developers have to be at least part masochist in order to thrive in the unique challenges of our chosen environments: business, technical, operational, and across nearly every other axis related to MMO development.

Devs are sometimes perceived as simply not wanting to give up any amount of control, or as people who enjoy screwing with others’ experiences as little tin gods of their own worlds, and so on, which is a view that’s both unfortunate and simplistic.

The big threshhold for me wasn’t related to anything like that. Bring on new ways of thinking, as long as the net effect is an added value to the customer experience as a whole.

However, in the hypothetical world where:

• Virtual goods have real world value.
• Players own the virtual goods, instead of having rights to use them
  • …causing volumes of property law to come into play
• Where I am liable for changes in value in a customer’s now-owned, real-world-valued item
• In which I can not alter the game in any meaningful way that affects said goods’ value
  • Whether that’s via releasing an expansion, or buffs/nerfs, or an unfortunately introduced dupe bug.
    • It’s not just “nerfs” - Improving item/class A causes an implicit devaluation of items/classes B-Z.
• That takes place in a world where value now implies that item-drops, xp rewards, et al, are gambling
  • …making us subject to gambling regulations as well
• Where I can’t push the liability for potential changes in value downstream

I might as well be in the business of making securities trading software on Wall St. or slot machine software in Nevada, both of which when taken individually, are regulated far less than the Worst Of Both Worlds hypothetical above.

Practically speaking, there are plenty of places in which a developer can build either of those, make quite a bit more money in the process, and work far more sane hours.

Of course, in our spare time, I imagine many of us would still make online games, just because the act of making them remains fun.

We just couldn’t let anyone else play them.

Yeah. Let’s not go there.

I don’t necessarily see this worst-of-both-worlds scenario actually happening, but this wouldn’t be the first time that I’ve been accused of having a hair too much faith in humanity, as is the case with so many developers - We just want to entertain.

…to bring you this interview with Ten Ton Hammer from IMGDC last weekend.

The conversation was all over the map and has some info on how we’ve been spending the last few months.

Cameron did a great job cleaning up an hour’s worth of empassioned tangents.

One thing that I either said wrong or got lost in translation: At the time we left our previous jobs, we did have a specific direction in mind and began heading there straight away. Some of our seemingly random experimentation has been a result of confirming or discarding parts of a larger plan. Others have been entirely random: “Hey! This Looks Neat…”

If you want to play with the Facebook app/game/toy/thing that’s mentioned in the article, you can find it here. It’ll happily generate either positive or insulting messages to send your friends.

One of the hypotheticals that Richard Bartle brought up in his IMGDC keynote was in the context of a cautionary tale of bringing too much commerce and too “light” of experiences to the MMO space.

The theory went: Given that people’s first experience with an MMO tends to frame how they view everything else from then on, if we introduce future players to the space with too much to sell them in worlds that don’t have enough depth to them, are we risking them not finding the experiences as intriguing as they are those of us who occupy those spaces in this generation, and have enjoyed them thoroughly in the past?

The old-guard developer in me nods emphatically at that thought, but after thinking about it on returning home, I’m not as sure.

While I was in the middle of assisting another progress bar in its epic journey from Left to Right yesterday, a friend and I found ourselves laughing at a subtle, modern reference on an item description that neither one of us had stopped to read before. (For the record it was: “This is my booterang. There are many like it, but this one is mine.”)

That example is a far cry from (say) a 2d, commerce-specific world like a Habbo Hotel, of course, but I realized that moments like that are what I play these games for now - If we can both laugh about something like that from 2000 miles away, and I find the experience now just as entertaining as I did back in the old days, is it any less of an experience?

It is a different one, for certain, but in a way it seems even more personal, since sharing that humor also implies a real-life connection to knowing where this friend and I both heard that quote, on top of the shared world-specific knowledge.

That’s an element of humor that likely wouldn’t have existed in MMOs ten or even five years ago. In ways such as that, the MMOs that we have today are already considerably lighter than the ones that I started out with.

Did I trade one indescribable thing for one that’s a little more describable?

As long as I’m entertained by the experience, having fun with friends, does it matter?

What do you think? What is the indescribable “thing” that attracts you to MMOs? Has it changed over the time you’ve played?

Do you feel like you’ve actively lost something in the process, or do you feel that you’ve seen your tastes evolve a little?

As for me, I’m still not sure, but it’s something that I’m going to be keeping a closer eye on now.

Thanks, Richard.

A friend that I haven’t heard from in a good number of years stumbled on this site the other week and referred to it as “my possibly dead blog.” While I’m definitely glad that people I’ve lost touch with are still able to find me, between that and the emailed checks-for-a-pulse that I’ve gotten recently, I should probably at least make some effort to keep it up to date.

One of the reasons that I let this site fall out of date is that somewhere along the line I fell into the habit of trying to “perfectly” compose my posts. I’m never happy with what I write at first, and usually post about the third or fourth time over them.

This takes an embarrassing amount of time and makes the whole effort feel like a lot more work than it really needs to be. This time I’m not doing that. I have exactly a half hour, I’m going to compose a little, and just stream past that.

I figure that the four of you who will read this likely don’t care that much about any level of polish anyway.

What’s been going on?

Still can’t talk too much about what’s been going on with the new business, but suffice it to say, we’re building things, experimenting, planning, and having a lot of fun. I talked with Michael from MMOGNation and Cameron from Ten Ton Hammer here at the show (more on that later) and gave them some general impressions that I have of the online games business, where it’s headed, and some of the critical problems that I think are worth solving. I suspect those’ll show up online sooner rather than later.

IMGDC Micro-recap

I’m in Minneapolis this weekend for IMGDC, the indie MMO game developers’ conference. I wasn’t able to come out last year, but I’m glad I was able to this time around.

Thank you for not having a ton of snow this weekend, by the way.

I can’t remember the last time I was at a conference this small and focused. Big enough to feel valuable, but small enough to where you can get familiar with everyone and recognize most faces as you wander from session to session. It also surprised me that there ended up being quite a few sessions in which I wanted to go to more than one thing going on. For as many things as I appreciated seeing, there’s an equal number that I was sorry to have missed.

For my part, I was here to run a roundtable on gameplay data models and be on two panels. The roundtable was a riff on the debate last year that Joe Ludwig kicked off with his opinion on how his team chose to not implement scripting in their MMO.

It’s a topic that I hold near and dear, and thought it would make a good one for people to be able to explore a bit more in-depth in a more interactive environment than dueling blog entries on the internet. For the record, my position on the subject is that there is no universal absolute, and the right answer for any given product depends on a lot of things – no two teams, products, staffing capabilities, skillsets, schedules, budgets, and hiring plans are identical. I’d hoped to delve into more of the specific factors above, and explore how they can impact the decision, but the conversation was plenty lively without it. I hope everyone there got as much out of the exchange as I did.

The panels were on community building (with Ron Meiners and Tami Baribeau) and newbie experiences in MMOs (with Brian Green, Kelly Heckman, and Jason Murdick). Everyone genuinely tried to share from their own past experience, and personally, I tried to steer my answers toward practical, useful advice and a minimal amount of navel gazing, and I think I was at least a little successful there. Again, sincerely hope people found them useful.

And to anyone who was at any of the panels or the RT – If you have questions that you didn’t get answered, my email is right off the About tab on this page. Mail to your heart’s content. It was great meeting all of you.

One thing that I said that surprised people was that I actually got into engineering and development precisely because of my attachment to the communities surrounding the first games that I worked on, as opposed to having any particular technical bent or hardcore bit-tweaking desires as is the more typical route into programming.

Back in the days of the first text games that I was involved in (Scepter, GemStone), the communities and finding ways to entertain them were what pushed me forward, and in those days “forward” meant “learning to program.” It’s a good thing I happened to enjoy that too, but I’ve always been a “technology-as-means-to-an-end” type a lot more than a “technology-for-technology’s-sake” person.

Other random bits from the show:

* Both of Dr. Bartle’s talks were as educational and entertaining as always. His keynote, a hypothetical “ten year retrospective” view of MMOs from the year 2018 was alternately chilling, depressing, and then finally, triumphant.  (Edit: The slides are up now.  Go read them - You’ll laugh at least once.)

* Gordon Walton’s talk on the future of indie MMO development was surprisingly shocking, even for his usual, outspoken self. It’s really no wonder the PR types always want to try to keep him under wraps. Whew. Hope he’s all right once the journalists in attendance let loose with their transcripts.

* Either one of those two were worth the price of admission by themselves.

* Peter Freese gave a solid talk on 10 things you can do to torpedo your own development efforts by sharing examples of things that went less-than-perfectly in the past in a talk called “How Online Game Projects Fail.” It’s good for newer folks to hear about these things. Failing is painful, but it’s something that everyone goes through, and it is entirely survivable. Serious props to Peter for sharing both past and current difficulties. Anyone can brag when things are going great – What he talked about takes guts.

* Nick Fortugno from Rebel Monkey impressed me a lot in that he arrived with one presentation, then after spending a day around the crowd and the kinds of things that were being discussed, hacked it into something entirely new that was a better fit, and really well done – (to paraphrase) How The Casual World Views MMOs. It was a great talk, and based on the time I’ve spent around developers from all worlds in the last few months, dead on.

There were a lot more people that I wanted to talk about, but I appear to only be able to hold today in my head, and my half hour’s up. Time to head to the airport.

I’ll update again before three more months go by. Promise.

- Scott