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NASA Responds To MMO Concerns
Sean Hollister writes "GameCyte contacted Daniel Laughlin, Project Manager of NASA Learning Technologies, to find out where that $3 million budget for their educational MMO actually went. As it turns out, NASA still has the money — they are just planning to use it differently than we thought. Meanwhile, the 'non-reimbursable Space Act Agreement' actually allows the game developer to profit where they might not have, otherwise. 'If it were a government contract, it would be illegal to be paid twice, once by the government and a second time by consumers.'"
Here is how I seem to understand all of this debarcle...
Nasa wants to make a game.
They have a paltry $3mill budget to make it.
They decide to not pay the developers to make it, but let them profit from making the Nasa game.
The game developer has to make what is likely going to be a dull drab game (compared to other space MMO standards) and as a reward is ALLOWED to make money off said game.
Now is it just me, or is this utterly setting yourself up for a fall? Not only do you not get to have all the aliens and things running about in your game, you probably won't get to run about conquering and destroying, and due to budgets and the likely developers who would actually GO FOR THIS deal, you will likely end up with a B-Grade MMO that looks totally like a B-Grade MMO.
Is this really a smart step for Nasa? If you can't do it properly or well enough, sometimes it is indeed better not to do it at all.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Once by the taxpayers and then again by taxpayers. Well some of the consumers might not be taxpayers but that's beside the point.
I don't know if the government bureacrats quite understand how fast asset production eats through money. Its insane, and it continues getting more insane because increasing hardware capability leads to increased asset production cost AND the winner-take-most leaders in the MMORPG space are running away from the field qualitatively. You can make an MMORPG for $3 million, sure, but it will be like comparing Pine to GMail. Hint: people who enjoy MMORPGs do not typically choose Pine over GMail. (Pipe down, you. You're atypical. Ask the other folks in your WoW guild.)
Maybe someone could clue the NASA folks in. "Hiya guys, MMORPG has costs approaching that of programming control code for the shuttle." "Gadzooks! Why, $3 million wouldn't cover the header file on the system clock function!" "Yeah, its sort of like that. Except minus the defense contractor slush fund. But mostly like that."
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I am one of those horrible 'The universe is half full' guys and I see that the integration of science and MMO can in fact be exciting and visually entertaining where 'Mario' gets mushroom points for each correct solution. I was doing it myself and I don't see where NASA has an exclusive on the physics of the universe. --tag-- Please give me more mod points, I needs the 'precious'. Absolute stupidity, disrupts absolutely.
Since no professional company in their right mind would work on this, why doesn't NASA just turn the project over to students and pay them through STEM fellowships? (Which yeah, aren't a ton, but not bad either for 2 months of work that doesn't really need to be completed or justified. Freshman/sophmores can kind of code graphics/learn to and can probably be used/abused by a comp sci senior design team working on the game.) Granted, it won't be very good, but schools could turn this it into a long running project of sorts or just attach it to a graphics course.
open source modern art: laser taggi
I think they should just build something on top of Second Life. With $3m, they can actually do something in SL that's a lot better than other SL effort and they already have a user base. SL pretty much ensures it will be a B-rate experience, but at least it will be that, and it will be a B-rate experience that's better than all the other stuff in SL. And, maybe, NASA could actually get SL to fix some of the awful limitations of that platform.
Another NASA-ish thing to do might be to build something on top of Croquet (www.opencroquet.org)... they'd be supporting a neat platform, and for $3m, they could probably get the Croquet people quite interested and get something better out of it than paying a game company to develop a new MMO from scratch.
Why not? Think of it... NASA endorsement and advertising. Sure, maybe a major game studio isn't going to, but if people are willing to work on, say, open source projects where you pretty much won't make any money and never will, why wouldn't a relatively new game company try to work on it and get their name out there in a big way? It would be like an unknown composer (like me) getting to work gratis on a video produced by a major video studio. You don't get money, but you get your name out there in a big way, and if you do WELL, it would do wonders for future job contracts.
Maxis was working with NASA on SimMars, while I was there working on The Sims.
It was eventually canceled after The Sims shipped and sucked up all the resources into the franchise.
But some of the ideas from SimMars ended up in one of The Sims expansion packs and Spore.
From wikipedia:
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
"Someone please tell me this isn't a government operation."
Why, yes! I AM new here.
'If it were a government contract, it would be illegal to be paid twice, once by the government and a second time by consumers.' Except, with the game sure to cost far more than $3 million, they're really only being paid once.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
And NASA is in a great position to convince US citizens that they are responsible for the sun to rise every morning.
1. High-ups in X are instructed to increase management and administrative personnel in X at least four-fold, then to replace permanent employees at lower levels with private contractors;
2. Public perceives reduction of quality of service in X;
3. Government responds by injecting more money into X which goes into administration, management, and contracting;
4. Public perceives continuing low quality of service in X;
5. Government announces that "modernisation" is necessary, which is defined as the partial transfer of control at much higher levels from the people's hands (all citizens jointly own government bodies) to private corporations. Profit is creamed off by corporations but loss is swallowed by government;
6. Public perceives continuing low quality of service in X;
7. Government points out that this isn't the '70s any more and we can't have industries entirely renationalised;
8. Unless it's some nearly-essential service that private enterprise has managed to render nearly bankrupt, such as the railway network, then the government will inject large sums into private enterprise to keep the network afloat, and failing that, will finally take back government control;
9. But (1) will have already happened, so service will still suck.
Of course, the IMF/World Bank/everyone right of Stalin, and its minions in the form of "consultancy services" like Accenture, are on a mission to get each country to privatise everything, and it's often a condition of aid in Third World countries. The free-marketroids cry that it's "human nature" to only do things properly when for profit - which is why I must not be human when I chose research rather than a job in the City, I guess.
Don't you read the news & the job descriptions these days? No-one wants software. They want standards documents for software. Bring on the SNMP, J2EE, J2SE, JavaBeans, JavaMail, JCP, JDBC, JTA, ICE, MIDlet, Portlet, RTSJ....
Because if there is one constant I get from /. is how all these people here can do "X" better than someone else and how "Open Source" can do it even better and for free.
When push comes to shove suddenly its "unreasonable" or will result in a crappy product unless lots of money are spent.
Which is it?
I guess some NASA upper crusts bought into all that forum bragging as if it were meaningful.
* Oh, for reference go look up any story here on World of Warcraft or Diablo... I am still waiting for all these "better" games from forum members, now NASA is giving them a shot
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
First of all, they don't get to design whatever cool game they want and just get NASA endorsement and advertising. NASA has very specific requirements for the bids, which basically requires it to be "edutainment", targeted at a middle-school and high-school-aged audience. This drastically limits the chance it'll ever be profitable.
Second, making a high-quality MMO just takes a lot of money. A small startup game developer would have to be extremely well funded by venture capital to do so.
Third, I think you may be overestimating the cachet of a NASA endorsement.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I suppose that is technically true but defense contractors do it all the time. They sell weapons systems to other countries that were developed under government contracts. Do the HUGE proceeds go back into the taxpayer coffers? No. So they are getting around it somehow. How should this be any different?
More than likely the reverse will happen: a company with a popular MMO game will reuse their engine for the needs of NASA. This would be the smartest move financially.
Where in the f?cking constitution does it give the government the right to steal money from the people at gun point and give it to someone else to make a fu?king game. ARRRRRRGGGGG!!!!!
Actually, I think it's even worse. You can't really make even the Pine of MMOs for 3 million any more. Actually, I'll guess you never could.
You could make the Pine of single player RPGs, maybe.
Now take the costs for designing quests, landscapes, dungeons, etc, for that and multiply them by at least 10.
No, seriously. SP RPGs are aiming for anywhere between 10 and 100 hours of gameplay, with the curve actually peaking near the lower end of that. A MMO, I don't know the latest WoW figures, but back in the day of Everquest Sony had figured that the average player stays subscribed for 6 months. (Of course, like with any averages, not everyone is the same. Some quit after the free month, some stay for 4 years, but the average was half a year.)
You actually have to provide some content for them for 6 months. They have to actually keep finding stuff to do for that that long. Way past the point where a SP RPG player popped the DVD out and moved on to something else.
Six months is about 180 days. Let's say only 150 until he finished everything and got stuck in the endgame raid grind. (You don't want that to happen _too_ early, because a lot of people give up.) Let's also say we're not even aiming for 150 days of an unemployed obsessive gamer who puts in 16 hours daily. We're aiming for it to last 150 days for a borderline casual guy averaging 4 hours a day. (Which can also mean less than that on weekdays and a bit longer on Saturday and Sunday, so it's not as obsessive as it looks.) The 16 hours-a-day maniacs will, of course, then finish the game in a little over a month, but, oh well. So, anyway, we're up to 600 hours of gameplay already.
Even if you do go heavier on the time sinks than in a SP RPG, there's only so much time sink percentage you can have before most people find it non-fun. Taking a wild guess based on WoW's design, at the lower levels you want almost no time sinks, while later it gradually increases. But even that boiling-the-frog model lets you rise the bar only so far. So let's be generous and assume you managed to make a whole 50% of your game be time-sinks, and somehow you din't lose 99% of the players because of that.
That's still enough content for a 300 hour SP RPG you need to have there. It's more work than it sounds.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If whatever Nasa is working with developers to build is similar to the old Earth Orbit Stations (obviously updated as it's 20 years old)
there is a lot of potential for game play.
Certainly there's no reason to build a Diku type MUD/MMO where each player is a character. It probably doesn't have to be a persistent world either in the sense of going in and moving around, but persistent in keeping track of what projects you have attempted.
They could easily simulate multiple countries or companies racing for objectives. First team to capture a comet and deliver it to moon orbit for volatiles.
They could allow experimentation with different types of fuel. With SSO or stage designs. Try different ways of building a beanstalk.
And on the business side, clearly there's a minimum size but if it is popular enough then they can plan for expansions. It's the web so updating it should be part of the project plan.
Is it for a fully deployed and maintained MMO game? Or is it just for the developed software? There's a huge difference (though neither seems reasonable for the $3M number). BUT, I can perhaps imagine a software company willing to take on the project if NASA were to take on the task and costs of hosting and maintaining the app.
Three million might not be enough to develop a whole new game, but why not build on existing games. Second Life for example. Now, wouldn't a new space colony and exploration "module" for Second Life be pretty damned cool? Complete with shuttle trips, "space shuttle" rentals for zooming around the galaxy, and martian souvenirs stores be pretty kick ass? And probably doable for 3m.
"it would be illegal to be paid twice, once by the government and a second time by consumers.'"
Umm, no it wouldn't. Its called "maintenance agreement" and the money would come from NASA's budget, not from the 'consumer'. Since when does any consumer pay NASA? I'm sure we have plenty of these with many of their other software products. This is how a vendor continues to make money from something over and over without actually providing anything of value.
"You're welcome to let us use your commercial game for free."
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Dear Zod I wish I had mod points...
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
"If it were a government contract, it would be illegal to be paid twice, once by the government and a second time by consumers."
This is not true. There are many ways to write a gov't contract and, although the general policy is that anything bought by the government becomes public property, there are common exceptions.
It is not illegal to be "paid twice, once by the govt and once by consumers." Most contracts give commercial rights to the contractor. What is illegal is to be paid twice by the govt. IE do the MMO for NASA then sell it to the Army.
I was at the workshop on Monday. What a freaking fiasco. I watched NASA come off as arrogant idiots that have no understand on the commercial space they are trying to invade. They acted like they were Disney. "We have the experts. (But oh yeah, you can go get experts, they just arent all in one place." Blah blah blah.
Epic FAIL!
Sorry, I HATE saying it. HATE HATE HATE. I want this to succeed so badly, it has such potential. Just remember, you get what you PAY for.
The only part of NASA that ever speaks, the PR Department.