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.

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.

Richard Bartle has woken the periodic “Why is Fantasy the dominant MMO genre?” beast at TerraNova, and it demands to feed on our attention.

It’s prompted a number of replies and other posts that bring up some good points:

• Risk-averse development
• Convenience of having ‘magic’ to explain things
• The existence of Tolkein
• The existence of AD&D
• Likeliness of appealing to both genders
• …and others…

I think that all of those arguments have some degree of merit - There are aspects of each that are very true. There are also great replies from Damion Schubert and Michael Scoggin there in the TN thread.

Michael’s point that “…humans have more universal reaction to organic stimulus.” is the closest to the answer that I’ve always given.  It’s great to see someone actually having studied this.

As for my take, even before you get into development risk, or D&D, or Tolkein, or any of the rest of the above:

Fantasy resonates primarily for three reasons:

1. We (humans, both men and women) are just plain wired to be instinctively affected by it in a way that other genres don’t cause, and…
2. For the majority of the (US/EU) playing audience of both genders, that wiring is initially built upon by the fact that it’s the first fiction we’re ever exposed to, which is when most of our fondest/strongest memories are formed, and..
3. …there’s a good chance that it’s most likely the genre that woke our imaginations in the first place.

Pick a subject at random.  What’s the first thing that you think of?

I’ll pick “winter.”  The strongest/fondest/first memory is a blizzard from when I was about 7, building snow forts with my friends Lee and Tony in giant 12 foot drifts up against the cinder-block walls of a garage, with a shiny red aluminum snowshovel while wearing a yellow winter jacket and dark blue mittens.

Or I could pick “music.” The first flash of a memory that makes me smile is my mother playing singalong-type folk songs on her classical acoustic, sitting next to the heavy coffee table on the floor in our living room in the house we lived in when I was 5, taping us singing along on an ancient cassette recorder.

My point is: Early memories are sticky. 

…and the early memories that first woke your imagination are sticky beyond ever being dislodged.

When it comes to fictional attachment, forget about Tolkein or AD&D, I’m talking even earlier:

• Snow White
• Jack and the Beanstalk
• Cinderella
• Hansel and Gretel

Just from four stories at random, you have fantasy concepts burned in: Dwarves, Witches, Princesses, Heroes, Poison, Castles*, Giants, underdogs triumphing over stronger evil…and lots and lots of Magic.

([*] Sorry, Richard - To a lot of us “castles” are a fantasy element, not something you can wander down the road a ways to see.

You don’t need to have been exposed to all of them.  As long as you’ve been exposed to enough of these tales, you already have a solid foundation.

To paraphrase Raph (and I’ll apologize in advance for mangling the concept) one part of Fun is the idea of building on things that we already know, by learning more about them and being rewarded for it.

In most of us, there’s already this functional, working base of Fantasy bits there just waiting to be awoken and built upon.  That’s what drives us to Tolkein, to AD&D, and to Fantasy worlds that reward us for building on this pre-existing knowledge.

Things that we enjoy later are (relatively speaking) acquired tastes.  I enjoy Sci Fi worlds a lot now, but I enjoy them for what they are - Crafted places of varying degrees of quality and fun - They don’t have the same kind of difficult-to-define resonance that Fantasy does.  They take effort to get “lost” in.

Like I said in the subject, I’d definitely love to be wrong on this one, because I do agree that it’s limiting us.  I’d love to see the market more open to first-timer success in other interesting directions.

(When I say first-timer, I mean that we’re not going to be able to count, for example, Blizzard’s eventual World of Star-iablo’s success here - That will be a victory built on the strength of a brand, not a victory for genre diversity.)

Even if I am right, I don’t believe for a moment that all is lost. 

As the market continues to grow, which it’s going to do in all forms of online entertainment, even if 50-70% of the experiences out there remain fantasy based, there are plenty of chances for success in other genres.

As the whole pie grows, the non-fantasy slice will grow along with it.  The majority may continue to cut their teeth on Fantasy, then they’ll acquire tastes for other worlds.  And so the cycle continues.

Compounding that, as time goes on and tools improve, it’s going to become more and more possible to make compelling worlds for less money.  The days when “success = 250,000+ paying customers” are not just going away, they’re already long behind us.

As it stands right now, as many other games have proven, you don’t even need six figures of users to make your development money back, turn a profit,  continue to build a healthy business, a solid brand, and be able to do good by your customers.  Those stories just don’t make nearly as interesting of headlines as “WoW scores its 15,000,000th user!”

The presence of the juggernaut has changed the average observer’s perspective of what “success” is by a fair bit, but it hasn’t changed the reality.  On the contrary.  It’s actually created a lot of interesting opportunities.

In that light, I think that “Why Fantasy?” isn’t really the most interesting question to ask.

The more interesting one is: “Okay.  It’s Fantasy.  We accept that.  How do we best expand from here?”

A comment was raised on f13.net yesterday that I see a lot every time an MMO doesn’t make it all the way out the door. Emphasis is mine on the parts that caught my attention:

True, but I have to think that someone has managed to get people to collaborate in other venues… and so we are not talking about creating something completely new here. I am just having a hard time figuring out why skilled people (I assume some of the people making MMOs actually have the skill to work on other types of projects and just Chose an MMO) given a LOT of money (yea I still see 10’s of millions as a lot) cannot get through a successful design/production phase. It seems that there is something inherent in the MMO beast itself that kills the process.

There definitely is. And it’s a lot more than a single “something.” Some of the issues have to do with MMOs in particular, and others are compounded by the types of people who are most likely to attempt to develop them. Generally very sharp and motivated people.

My reply clipped from the same thread:

(Disclaimers: Personal opinions here only, unrelated to SOE. I haven’t even remotely been involved with G&H or Perpetual in any capacity and don’t know a thing about their game. My comments are speaking entirely in generalities. Dealerships negotiate their own prices. Beware of falling rock.)

A few observations from past MMOs:

#1: MMOs are still really young. To a lot of the people working on them, it very much is creating something entirely new. Compare to movies or single player games, for instance. It’s less of a challenge to staff those types of projects up with people who’ve worked on them before, in all of the right positions. Doing the same on a high-budget MMO remains next to impossible.

I don’t mean “key management” or “leads” like you see in studio announcements and press releases all the time. I mean everyone other than a small number of entry-level folks. Until you’ve done it once, you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.

I don’t know of a single high-budget MMO that’s been staffed with that kind of experience throughout, simply because those people just plain don’t exist yet in sufficient numbers. We’re just now at the point where it’s starting to become possible to build teams like that.

Just a guess, but I’m betting that you don’t hear from the $100m movie set: “Yeah, Bob the Key Grip has done this once before, and he picked out some really sharp guys from a construction site downtown to do the rest. He’ll teach ‘em what to do.”

Leading to…

#2: The things that make for a great demo and pitch that get you funding, publishing deals, et al, are a much smaller part of making a great MMO than they are of making any other kind of game, and it’s easy to lose sight of that.

This is painful for MMOs in particular because of the unique (huge) number of critical, non-sexy things that you have to succeed at, where failing at any one of them can entirely sink your game:

- Pipelines
- Tools
- Infrastructure
- Stability (again, doubling the work - the client and all the servers)
- Scalability
- Stability
- Security (added this in for the blog post - Can’t trust that client)
- Performance (optimize both that client and all those server processes)
- Oh, and..Stability

In any development effort that has a finite set of resources ($$$ + time), the more you invest in the flash elements, the less you can invest in the far less sexy parts. (Core files aren’t sexy.)

Which, in turn, leads to…

#3: Wild misscoping. It’s a common newbie (and overly-optimistic-veteran) mistake to scope far too optimistically, as the schedules end up based mostly on the flash elements and end user features.

If a person is new at making one of these (especially noted with people from non-MMO games backgrounds), they tend to be more likely to focus on scoping dev time out with more of an emphasis on the visible features than the budget will end up allowing, and not enough on the critical, non-visible features. Those, coincidentally, end up taking far longer than anyone ever predicts.

The team who scopes 80% of their time on the visible features and 20% on the rest is going to make a far different game than the one who scopes 25% features, 25% tools/pipelines, and 50% stability/scalability/infrastructure.

If your timeline has some elasticity, you can make up for misscoping by stretching the schedule, and still go on to make a great game. If you can’t, Bad Things happen.

There are plenty more things that go wrong, and from all different angles, but from the production “why can’t people seem to get these out the door?” angle, these are the ones that’ve been the first to jump out at me.

As for the things that go wrong from the other angles? Now that’s a subject for another post entirely.

Haven’t abandoned the blog - Typing original content with the busted wrist is a lot more difficult than it really should be. Three weeks to go!

In the meanwhile, here’s an Interview with Ten Ton Hammer that went up yesterday.

The game-neutral concept that’s touched on here is games adapting to their players.

The rules have changed a lot since the days of there only being a single online world choice at any given time. You’ve got to learn as much as you can about the audience that you have, and make sure you’re meeting their needs as best as you can.

Another “duh” concept that falls cleanly into the “more than just the right thing to do; it’s also good business” bucket.

Relevant clip from the interview:

Savanja: What prompted the decision to move nearly all of the heroic content from the overland zones?

Scott Hartsman: The fact that overland heroic content went largely unused was the biggest driver in this decision. It doesn’t take a long visit in any of the global level channels to infer that very few people go through the effort of grouping to adventure in an overland zone, and the logged combat data backed this up. Solo/Duo-capable outdoor content gets played; heroic content very seldom does.

It’s a case of the game adapting to the way people actually play, compared to how they were originally assumed to want to play. People don’t “group up, then wander around looking for something to do” in open-ended hour-after-hour six person play.

People are objective-based, generally conscious of how much time they have available to play, and tend to want to group with people whose goals for the moment match theirs. Taken as a whole, they form groups with the express purpose of going out to do something specific. Many also prefer to know ahead of time that they’re embarking on an adventure they have time to complete. In EQII, both of those specific attributes of grouping can best be addressed via dungeons and instances.

On top of all of that, the split between outdoor/indoor also reduces frustration on both ends and it sets an expectation that people can begin to rely on. Solo/duo folks can consistently enjoy their own play style by not encountering unattainable group content in the overlands. Those group folks who do play-by-wander won’t be frustrated by all of the ‘useless’ solo creatures there – They know to head indoors.

It’s a common misconception that people universally hate change. People only hate change that doesn’t make intuitive sense when they try to reconcile it with their own individual experience and, more importantly, their desires for their future in your world.

That’s the part that you really don’t want to screw up - Losing the trust of the people who actually do see themselves as having a future there. Those are the ones to foster.

The big-ego days are long gone, unless you’re interested in setting yourself up for a potentially painful fall. When you examine your motives for making online entertainment, if you don’t see yourself deep down as being the provider of a service (yes, on the development side), be ready to eventually lose out to someone who does.

(Tip of the hat to Chris Cao who was the first person I heard use the phrase “people are objective-based” in neatly summing up that concept in a lot fewer words than I’d ever been able to.)

- Scott

(This does refer to something in EQ2, but I’m trying to abstract it as much as possible. The specific thing isn’t really relevant.)

There’s a feature we just released. On the whole, people really like it. I think it’s going to do good things for the game, largely in terms of fostering character attachment and emergent play — Two important long term goals for us.

Here’s a dirty little secret: From the time it was proposed, until a couple weeks before it went live, I hated it. It felt wrong to me. It masked an element of worldly coolness that I had personally been attached to. Just wrong. No way. Never going in.

Its okay to be wrong, you know. No matter who you are, you’re going to be wrong a lot.

It’s how you handle it when you are that counts.

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Literally. I’m enjoying it while it lasts.

I joined a softball team with folks from work this fall. Tonight was the first game. For my part, I was pretty happy I remembered which hand the glove went on.

Since we have a bye next week, I expect that my batting average will last precisely two weeks. Possibly longer if Coach Joe and Coach Ed can be talked into not playing me at all for the rest of the season. Hmm…

What’s this have to do with games?

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