Scott Hartsman - Off the Record

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

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?”

Reposted from the EQ2 forums:

December 2007 Producer’s Letter. Part 1: Coda

I’ve never been a fan of saying goodbye, but it’s time. Today is my last day here at SOE.

In addition, I’d like to say thank you.

Thank you all for playing in these worlds that I’ve had the chance to touch over the past years.

Thank you for your boundless dedication and passion to what it is that we’ve all created here.

To many of you, thank you for your friendship. A lot of you have been nothing short of an extended family over the past years.

I will miss you all.

The years of working on EverQuest and EverQuest II have been the highlight of my career, and have led to a significant personal milestone as well.

The release of EverQuest II: Rise of Kunark marks the 30^th online games product that I’ve been fortunate enough to ship. I sincerely hope that you’ve enjoyed what I was able to contribute to this amazing franchise as much as I’ve enjoyed being a part of it.

When asked what exactly I do for a living, I’ve referred to it many times as “having the greatest job working on the best teams in the world.”

That’s still true today. It’s possible for that to be true as well as to know that I’ve done the best work that I can on a world, and that it’s time to hand the reins over to others whose best is still ahead of them.

It’s time for me to see what else is out there waiting to be built. It might even end up being something involving SOE. Regardless, I’m sure we’ll get a chance to meet up again, whether I’m making new MMOs, continuing to play them, or talking about them on the internet.

I wouldn’t be leaving SOE if I wasn’t positive that the responsibility for EQ2 was being left in the right hands.

Taking over for me is Bruce “Froech” Ferguson. Some of you will remember his name from EQ2 beta, others of you may have met him at Fan Faires. If you have met him, you know he’s one of the most straightforward guys you’ll ever be lucky enough to meet.

A few important things to know about Bruce and why I think SOE made the perfect call here:

• Up until shortly after launch, he was EQ2’s live producer. This move is more of an overdue homecoming than anything else.
• Before his production days, his background is also originally in working very closely with online communities as far back as text MUDs. This community deserves nothing less.
• He knows that with respecting communities comes respecting the worlds they’ve grown to love. He’s not the kind of person who’s going to come in and start re-envisioning the game wholesale.
• He has long standing relationships with all of the leads and production staff on EQ2. In a number of cases, even longer than mine.

In short, Bruce is the perfect person to help this team continue to succeed in their mission of producing what we all know is the best MMO out there.

For my part, know that I count myself exceptionally fortunate to have been a part of such great endeavors, and I remain thankful for having been given the opportunity.

Until next time,

Scott Hartsman
Senior Producer Emeritus, EverQuest II

I’ve worked with some of the brightest, most dedicated people that I’ve encountered in my entire career in my time at SOE. I sincerely wish them all the best of luck in the future.

It’s definitely a bittersweet day, but an exciting one as well.

As for what the future holds, if you’d like a heads up when we have something to talk about, add your email address to the Keep In Touch box over there on the right and we’ll make sure you hear about it.

- Scott

To paraphrase a smart guy named Jake Smith:

“The act of moving files from Point A to Point B, where Point B is your live environment, is a process that merits being QA’ed all on its own. Twice.”

Downsides:

• If you’ve set up your environments in a way where this is as hands-off, just-push-a-button as it can possibly be, this can still result in an hour or four of extra time spent for every single update.
• Maintaining a dedicated environment in which to do this redundantly costs money in hardware, and in people’s time, in perpetuity.
• Those hours are frequently very boring for everyone involved.
• It’s very seldom that anything actually goes wrong.
• The temptation to skip doing it can be unbearable when you’ve promised that your game will be available at a certain time. Especially when you easily can do the math in your head and know that doing this will push you past that time. No one wants to disappoint their customers by being late.

Upside:

• This doesn’t happen.

I have no idea if this is actually what happened in this situation, but this is another one of those pieces of information that I’d like to make sure I never forget about.

My sympathies to the folks on both sides of it here. Good luck in getting it all worked out.

- Scott

…multiple times since moving to California. More in LA and Orange County than here in San Diego.

From: http://www.rinkworks.com/said/tourism.shtml

• Him: “Well, welcome Samantha. You’re from Minnesota, right?”
• Me: “No, Wisconsin.”
• Him: “So you’re from…Chicago?”
• Me: “No, sir, that is in Illinois.”
• Him: “Oh, and you’re from Michigan!”
• Me: “No, sir, Wisconsin.”
• Him: “Well, why didn’t you say so earlier?”
• Me: “I don’t know, sir.”
• Him: “So there’s a lot of cheese there right?”
• Me: “Some, sir.”
• Him: “And y’all’s football team is the Cubs, right?”
• Me: “No sir, that’s Illinois.”
• Him: “Vikings?”
• Me: “No. That’s Minnesota.”
• Him: “But I thought you’re from Minnesota.”
• Me: “No sir, I’m from Wisconsin.”
• Him: “Oh…so you don’t have a football team there!”
• Me: “No sir, the Green Bay Packers are very popular there.”
• Him: “But that’s a Michigan team.”
• Me: “No sir, Green Bay is in Wisconsin.”
• Him: “But I thought you were from Illinois.”
• Me: “No sir, Wisconsin.”
• Him: “Oh. So you just have hockey there, huh?”
• Me: “Not any professional teams, sir.”
• Him: “Well, I thought the Stars were from up there.”
• Me: “From Minnesota sir, but now they play for Dallas.”
• Him: “Do they really? I didn’t know that.”
• Me: “Yes, sir, they do.”
• Him: “Well, anyway. Welcome, Samantha from Michigan.”
• Me: “Wisconsin.”

Other than the part about people calling me Samantha. Knock on wood, but so far that one’s never happened.

It’s nice to see I’m not alone. Happy thanksgiving.

(and go Pack! …who won already…so..er…went Pack!)

- Scott

Josh has a good summary up of how the morning went.  A couple entitlement snags being worked out, a patcher having one wrong file for an hour caused a boat to disappear, and extremely heavy patch load for the first couple hours.

In terms of the game itself?  Amazingly uneventful.  Everything passed on the first try.

And then there were thousands of Sarnaks running around.

I got to play quite a bit tonight and enjoyed every second of it.

I’ll take that as a win.