Scott Hartsman - Off the Record

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.