Here is a pretty awesome post about lessons learned in games applied to marketing. Not lessons like ‘trolls need to be hit with fire to prevent them regenerating’, more like lessons learned about what is great about gaming and how it could be applied to marketing.

To me, the final lesson is perhaps most important not least because in many ways it incorporates the first two : Slay monsters, Get stuff, Tell the story. (The story contains the monster slaying and the stuff getting of course.)

‘Telling the story’ has been a buzzphrase in marketing forever, and in other industries too. It may seem obvious but in a way what I dont think I’d noticed before is what a simple and obvious lesson it might be for RPGs… The most successful marketing stories, Lurie claims, are those that put the customer in them. Not that relate the tales of another great hero but that instead make the consumer – the ‘marketee’- the hero. Doesnt the power of this lesson when applied in marketing demonstrate the bogus nature of third person narratives in games? Is it worth creating a character and then trying to find ways to encourage your player to ‘relate’ to that character when the quickest way to immerse them in the story is to actually put them in it?

On a family trip (randomtastic!) to Hay On Wye I picked up a book on ‘The Art of Game Worlds’ from Ilex books (Amazon). Published in 2004 it has some wonderful illustrations of some deeply involving game environments many of which are based entirety in fantasy. This, and a comment made by a friend about how the mythology of WoW is ‘lost on him’ got me thinking about the importance of solid and developed game ‘worlds’ as apposed to ‘environments’.

In many games (large scale RPGs and MMOs the obvious exceptions) understanding ones immediate environment has much more of an impact on the game than understanding the world as a whole. Indeed, because it is the environment that we are interacting with, rather than the world, many of the additional social, cultural, and even physical parameters of the game world are simply adopted from our own real life in order to ensure they are not a barrier to understanding. In ‘Borderlands 2’, for example, the populus are a distinct breed of ‘southern hick’ not just in their appearance and dialogue, but also in their sociocultural presentation. It is not important for the player to understand WHY they are surrounded by the population of Arkansas, only that they should respond and appreciate them as such.

Is it valuable then for a game designer to waste time building a complicated and intricate historical backdrop to the immediate environment? Or would the immediate challenges of gameplay be enough? Does the relationship between the Blood Elves and the Night Eleves matter even to players in the RP realms when the cooldown of Judgements being lowered by .5 seconds is all both the player AND the ‘real life’ Paladin would really care about?

I found mass effect 2 awesome, and I havnt even played it. I spent a good few hours watching my flatmate pay his way through it peppering him with annoying questions like ‘who that was’, ‘were they in the first one’, and ‘when can I see that cool frog alien in combat – pick him! Pick him!’ Next to Assassins Creed 2 I think it has been the most enjoyable game to watch and I believe this article articulates what I was feeling. The game is ALIVE.

Through the core of the game is a fairly standard adventure story – threat to all mankind, one man can save us all – but around the plot are characters living their lives unaware of, or uninterested, in the impending threat. While it is not usual for NPCs to carry on oblivious those in ME2 seem to carry on with their OWN lives, instead if simply acting as an interactive function for the player. Shopkeepers talk about other shopkeepers and mention in dialogue their own goals, most of which are completely unconnected with those of the player character. These goals can then be absorbed as mini-quests which offer not only cash and XP rewards but also the respect or alliance of NPCs meaning lower shop prices, new items, or other assistance. It’s an altogether much more organic way to collect quests and the narrative nature of the process makes the NPCs all the more realistic – you know not just what they want, but why they want it.

As always Sherry Turkle as had a hand in defining this process, coining the term ‘Artificial Emotion’ (I love how Terranova mention her in a way at could just as easily be contempt as respect). It has certainly made ME2 a much more enjoyable ‘experience’ for me than, for example, borderlands where despite convincing and amusing NPC dialogue there is much less sense of interaction with the quest givers. The elaborate and convincing nature of the interaction Could well be absolution to the logistical difficulties posed by the approach I have chosen to investigate for my MMO project. An intriguing article.

I know I’m a bit slow with this one but as a follow on to my post about signs and symbols in a virtual world I wanted to share this awesome pic :

THIS is what an MMO riot looks like! It excited me hugely this. It is a slightly bizzare response to the discovery of what gamers thought was a rising sun flag in a Chinese MMO. They were livid (for anti-imperialist reasons) and took to the ‘streets’ to protest.

I love that with all the current student protests in the UK in the back of my mind I can look at this virtual protest and find it intimidating. Frightening even. I find this a wonderful example of how I am bringing my own real world experience to a virtual setting since I am not only unsettled by the apparent ‘crush’ but also by the obvious loss of control – the breakdown of a familiar interface in the wash of bodies. It demonstrates an additional tool for the developer (although not deliberate here!) : breaking usually sacrosanct guidelines and messing with the interface. Panic is guaranteed!

I have been having a go at Darkfall Online – an MMO I was OBSESSED with in development and the missed out on the public beta. Furthermore, the game has no Mac version so its only now that I have a PC to hand that I can have a crack at it. I have mixed emotions…

I like how it looks, even on the steam powered beast I have to play it on, and there are many elements of it that are highly commendable. I like the realtime combat. I like the way magic is handled (to an extent). And I really like the super steep learning curve. Or so I thought…

I spent a couple of hours playing it today. WHizzing through quests and getting my magic skill up (painfully PAINFULLY slowly) largely enjoying and feeling pleased with my progress through what is an undeniably challenging game. Then, disaster struck : The game has a ‘full loot’ mechanic meaning that when you die your corpse just sits there, with all its stuff on, for anyone to loot. Its a race against fate to get back to it in time to collect your goods and when I say ‘goods’ I mean EVERYTHING. I had spent quite some time collecting mundane quest items (ashes, resin, mining ore, that sort of thing) and to my horror on death I lost all of that too. A good chunk of my questing time was wasted.

Now I understand that for realism purposes this is necessary but I would argue there is a bit of a disconnect. The quests themselves are neither logical nor realistic (go here, get this, kill that, bring me the other) in much the same way as other MMOs handle questing. It seems unnecessary then to make the loss of quest items a feature of death – not least because the player who loots those items will likely just toss them in the bin. Frustrating to say the least.

Anyways. It made me annoyed enough not to want to keep playing so I shut down the machine and had a sulk. Perhaps when I calm down I will decide that this adds a great deal to game play but right now I cant help feeling that picking and choosing aspects of realism (where it is easy and convenient) is not the best approach to gameplay. Its a complicated balance and one that I cant help but feel is not quite right here…

This will no be my last Darkfall post, I suspect.

Is it truly possible to achieve total ‘immersion’ in a game world?

Even if the player is intimately familiar with the fictional universe in which they play they are still at the mercy of their real world personality and learning.

Over a Terranova they raise an interesting point about ‘symbols in virtual worlds’ which illustrates that each player bring their own framework for decoding images within a game. WoW little red crosses to indicate the first aid skill in use, but why would such a symbol be relevant to any one of the races in Azeroth and beyond?

These crosses are not meant to remind your night elf of St Johns Ambulance, is it? It is meant to help your western 21st century player identify the skill. Because our game hours represent such a miniscule percentage of our actual lives (even for hardcore gamers) it is necessary for us to bring our own signs and signifiers into the virtual world as a kind of short hand. Does this detract from immersion of the game world, breaking the illusion of a new reality? Or does encountering the familiar in fiction allow us to relate faster to constructed environment?

Here is a super interesting article about this somewhat unwieldy term. 

‘Gamification’, the internet will tell you, is the future. It’s coming soon to your bank, your gym, your job, your government and your gynaecologist.
 – Can’t play / Won’t play

I suppose as a fan of ‘Epic Win‘ I am already elbow deep in that process but her concerns resonate clearly with me. I dont ‘enjoy playing’ epic win so much as enjoy completing everyday tasks and I am in fact using epic win as a fancy to-do list. I can barely remember what level I am and most of my additional enjoyment of the app comes from the cleverness of the writing and the varied loot. This makes the ‘game’ much more involving for me and in many ways turns it into a game. All this, and the contents of the ‘Hide and Seek’ article reinforces the importance of understanding what drives players – the need to beat the game in a purely objective sense, or the need to develop within the ludic framework. 

I am not sure I agree with Edward Castronova of Terranova. What I mean to say is that while his notion of ‘exodus recession (increased virtual spending contributing to recession as it reduces spending IRL)’ is extremely interesting it fails to note that thanks to the increasing ‘freemium’ model of games and social network development much of cash spent in a virtual world is very often purchased with cash earned in the real world. It starts in the real world economy and ends up there too, with the virtual world simply as a service purchased.

 – Exodus Recession?

This is not the case, of course, in a number of large MMOs (*coughWoWcough*) where although purchasing gold is possible it is still entirely possible to make ‘satisfying purchases’ in Azeroth using only gold earned in game. If this trend were to increase (which seems unlikely since even Blizzard are moving to a freemium model) I would be more comfortable with the point above.

I had a pretty fascinating lecture from Steve Goss of Supermassive Games the other week and although the lecture was meant to be about getting into games employment it got me thinking a lot about this ‘freemium’ model that seems to have proved itself fairly conclusively in the last couple of years.

Supermassive are currently making exclusive content for the Connect system and, economically speaking, doing so in a fairly traditional way : large budget, medium development schedule, high risk. On the side, however, they have also produced a game of their own for PC called ‘Big Match : Striker’ giving them an income independent of the traditional games economy.

I think this is genius. It seems to me the large scale filmic economic model of games development is neither sensible nor sustainable unless supported by an organisation with pockets deep enough to swallow a failure, unless… If a games company can build a successful turnover using smaller, agile, baby games released at (nearly) no cost to the user but supported by in game content might they not then be able to break the shackles of ‘big publisher’ when it comes to creating their own epic-game? With a reliable freemium income, some time to build up cash reserves, and the increasing move to ‘self published’ content in theory a developer of any size could eventually afford to roll out a beefy franchise instead of waiting for a publisher to come knocking. This can only be a good thing.