Disclaimers: I'm an online game developer, but I don't speak for Blizzard, etc.
I'm sure Blizzard has hired psychologists to figure out the optimal effort:reward ratio to keep people playing as long as possible.
I'm sure they don't, because it would be stupid. A joke that online game devs tell is that our perfect customer subscribes to our game but never plays; that way we get all the revenue and none of the cost. Someone spending many, many hours in our game is actually a cost, and drives up the likelihood of them needing customer service (the expensive part of running an online game). So, there's less benefit to getting people hopelessly addicted to our games.
The thing that does keep people playing our games is the one thing we're talking about here: socialization. It's the social obligations that people feel to the other players in the game that usually keep them playing long term. Honestly, the game gets a bit old after a while; it's the people that keep it interesting.
Its not like anyone actually enjoys sitting there using the auction house.
Actually, some people do. Even before the easy availability of plugins like Auctioneer, there were people who bought and sold goods to try to control markets. Some were very successful. For some people, doing arbitrage on the auction hall was more rewarding (especially in money earned) than "playing" the game as intended.
Also, having a player economy satisfies a lot of other design requirements as well. For example, it provides one way to give crafters a ready market. In the old EQ games, tradeskills were seen as a money sink to get some good items. In WoW, most tradeskills can derive some profit if you put in enough effort; but, two gathering skills are the sure ticket to some extra cash. I'm interested to see what happens with enchanting now that they can effectively put enchants up on the AH. One of my friends just made 800 or so gold from posting enchants on the AH; he has no patience for selling his wares in town, so that's money he probably wouldn't have made anyway.
The challengers to everquest were ALWAYS about "improving" everquest by eliminating more 'downtime', being more solo-able, and allowing you get to the "fun parts" as you call them faster.
Well, as you point out, the problem is that by "improving" those areas they took out a lot of what people consider the "living world" aspects. Tough travel means that the world feels (and stays) larger, even thought it means you don't get to hop all over the world for some silly quest; it also sometimes means that you and your friend don't get to start playing together too easily, a definite drawback.
One thing most developers realized after games started reducing downtime is that the "downtime" was actually "social time" in MMOs. It was the time when people talked to each other and learned more about each other and formed friendships. Compare this with "PUGs" in WoW where people want to group, accomplish a goal, then leave as quickly as possible. That is, if they even group at all. I've made no long term friends in WoW, other than some of the people I chat with that were in the raiding guild I joined for a bit this year. Raids have more downtime, so there is more time to chat and make friends.
PS - Interesting comments on the history of Eve. I didn't know that. Its discouraging to say the least.
Yeah, it's not something that CCP obviously brags about.:) But, that's the reason why I keep telling people that they really have to support indie developers if they want to see indie games. Most companies can't do what CCP did with EVE. If you don't support the independent game makers, then we will die out and you'll only be left with WoW clones. The problem is, most people who really want something different aren't willing to put up with something that isn't as polished and attractive as the newer games. That leads to the paradox: people won't play a game without a large budget, and games with large budgets rarely try anything radical or niche. You have to ask yourself: do you want to play something pretty, or do you want to play something different? You're not going to get both anytime soon. That's the truth, beyond trying to get people to play my game (or future ones!);)
WoW may serve the most, but not because it is cheap and not fulfilling.
What I meant was that WoW was produced for the masses. McDonald's became popular because the food was cheap, available, and offensive to pretty much nobody. (Note that reputation has changed over time.) What does Blizzard do best? Take popular, established gameplay then polish it to high shine. The reason why WoW shuns the "living world" aspects the grandparent post was talking about is because that's a niche interest compared to streamlining the process of killing things and taking their stuff.
But at the point, it is really hard to see anything bringing WoW down.
People said the same thing about EverQuest before WoW. Of course, the thing that proves more successful than WoW may be another Blizzard MMO.;)
Sorry, best I can do right now. Plus, I'm sure someone with fewer digits will be along sometime soon. I'll let them give you the works.
Re:Power of community + run by the community?
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Tabula Rasa To Shut Down
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· Score: 2, Informative
That's a great response, thanks Psychochild!
My pleasure. I enjoy a good discussion about an area I'm pretty passionate about.
Let me give you a concrete counter-example to what you suggest is a fundamental problem.
I don't know much about Cube/Sauerbraten, so I can't comment on it directly. I will say that it's nowhere near as complex as an MMO. The game boasts 7 weapons, whereas Meridian 59, which is hardly the largest game, has 13 melee weapons, 4 ranged weapons, and over 150 individual spells that all have to be balanced against each other. It has many, many rooms, which are about as complex as DOOM 1 levels, all interconnected. Now, imagine a game like WoW that has hundreds of weapons, armors, spells, stats, etc.
But, let me give an example of what I was talking about: MUDs.
Text MUDs were the predecessors to modern MMO games. They were entirely text-based, but they shared a lot of features with modern MMO games. The two primary game-focused ones were LP-MUDs (which allowed user programming on the fly) and DIKU MUDs. DIKU MUDs were a lot more popular for two reasons: there was only one administrator and the popular verions had a game world right out of the box. LP-MUDs had a tradition of allowing the top players to become Wizards (coders) on the game, and you usually had to write most of the game world yourself. The shared administration duties caused a lot of schisms, and probably at least half of the LP MUDs out there were formed when someone got into an argument and took a copy of the existing game to create their own version of the game.
And, in games where you had a variety of people working on them, you often had special issues. For example, every new player wanted to have the "best" area, which mean that you had to have something special in your area that was more desireable. Perhaps the most powerful weapon or armor, so you had the original cause of "mudflation". Or, you had one person working on an X-Men themed area right next to one area with Ninjas and another area parodying My Little Pony. A far cry from the (mostly) coherent storylines found in current graphical games.
MUDs used to be what people who wanted to do an online game made back in the day. There were a lot of them, and the best ones (and most of the ones that still exist today) had very strong, central authorities to support them.
One other thing to consider: What is the weakest area of open source development? Usually the documentation. It's not sexy and few people really want to do it. However, game development is about 50% documentation (that is, the game design). I noticed Sauerbraten has a Wiki, so it's ahead of that game. But, look at the documentation the vast majority of open source projects out there; the documentation only becomes mature once the project has been out there long enough. That's death for a large scale game like an MMO.
[Y]ou could always just play with people you trust instead. That's been a good strategy to use in countless online games, and works a treat when they're instanced. Not a showstopper.
We're talking an MMO here, though, not something like a personal Neverwinter Nights server. The difference is trying to run a D&D game for your friends vs. trying to run D&D games for a convention. If you just want to play with your friends, then you're not talking about an MMO anymore. Not to say that something like a game server where you could play with your friends wouldn't be cool, but it's not the same.
So, there's some clarification on my points. I think the differences between a multiplayer FPS and an MMO is important. In fact, the first "M" stands for "massively", which was intended to separate these games from the 16 player FPS servers that were available back in the day.
Now, all this isn't to say that I think a community project would never work or that I wouldn't support one. I know a few of the WorldForge people and really respect them for the work they've done. But, I've heard from them first-hand about the issues they've faced.
As a game mechanic [auction houses are] fundamentally FLAWED.
It depends on what the goal of the mechanic is. In the case of WoW, it streamlines the experience and lets people get to the "fun parts" of building up a character faster. So, in this instance, it's actually a rousing success. You're arguing that it takes away something that you value: the feeling of a living world. But I don't think that goal, as you would define it, was ever an intention of WoW. Therefore, you can't say the auction houses are fundamentally flawed as the apply to WoW.
The trouble, or perhaps the beauty of WoW, is that they cater to a (massive) player base who really just want to "kill stuff and get loot" and -anything- that slows down either they want removed or mitigated.
Exactly. And, know what? A lot of old-school MMO game players heralded that as a success. It gets people to the "fun parts" of the game. It doesn't make the game feel like "a grind". People have welcomed this with open arms. WoW has, by far, the largest subscriber base in North America of any game; the masses have spoken, and they like that type of game. (Not to downplay the market power of the "Blizzard" and "Warcraft" names, though, since those helped a lot.)
Unfortunately, the grim business reality is that most projects are going to want to aim for this market. Back when EQ1 was the king of the roost, people wanted MMO projects to be "more like EverQuest!" Now that WoW is top of the heap in terms of subscribers, people want that. Especially the people funding these projects, because they want to make what Blizzard is making off of WoW. That means things like having what feels like a "living world" is not usually a concern for MMO game developers, specially the ones getting big funding from game companies.
Eve proves that niche games can be successful
EVE proves nothing of the sort. EVE was a commercial failure when it launched, the publisher dropped the project quickly after launch. For most companies, this would have been death. CCP, the developers of EVE, got funding from the goverment of Iceland, and thus were able to re-acquire the rights to the game and stay in business. EVE was able to stick with development and enjoy some modest success for being a game that didn't try to directly copy EQ or WoW. But, it took a pretty special set of circumstances for the game to survive and thrive. A lot of niche games aren't so lucky.
This is why I made a big deal about people having to accept that a niche game isn't going to be as large, high quality, and/or as cheap as mainstream games. WoW is like McDonalds: it serves millions and millions, but it's not the best food you'll ever eat. If you want something more healthy and tasty, you aren't going to be able to only spend 99 cents for your hamburger; likewise, if you want something that isn't built to cater to the largest market possible, get ready to have to accept some compromises.
What killed it? Most player really don't want to interact - it 'slows' them down.
To be fair, most people play these games for diversion. So, they tend to want to get into the fun quickly. Being able to head to the auction house and then fly to my destination is easier than traveling for an hour or more to the accepted trading location and bartering with people. That is, assuming you got the memo about where the accepted location is if the game developers haven't set aside a location.
Richard Bartle, co-author of the first text MUD, wrote about this. He pointed out that design ideas can be good or bad in the long or short term. Many games tend to have a lot of features that are good in the short term, even if they are bad in the long term. It's also hard to introduce a feature that is bad in the short term but good in the long term. So, removing the auction house and putting in player trade stalls might be a good long term feature, but it'd hurt in the short term so there is no way that WoW would do that. And, now that WoW has set the standard, not including an auction house would be a short term negative for a possible long term benefit; in other words, it won't work because players will complain about the short term pain.
IMHO, the solution here is to start making smaller-scale MMOs. There are enough people that share your tastes that a game could be made to cater to you. There are two issues to overcome: first, you have to realize that you will be playing a niche game instead of a large one, and that means you're not going to get a game with a $50 million budget. Second, you have to accept that you'll probably have to pay a bit more for the game in order to make the game appealing in a financial sense. For now, it's mostly going to be small, independent developers (like me!) looking to service the niche, and we still have to eat and pay rent.
Maybe being a kernel developer has me thinking that kernels are easy and games are hard.
I do game development for a living, not kernel development. But, I agree game development is pretty difficult. As I mentioned in a reply to the post parent to yours, the big issue is that game development has a large creative component in addition to the technical issues, and creativity relies on opinion. If you and I disagree on a task scheduling system, we can each build our systems and then run tests to see who has the superior result for the situations we are likely to encounter. If you and I have a different idea for gameplay, particularly if it's something fundamental to the game like going with a class and level system vs. a skill-based system, it's hard to build the systems in any reasonable time frame and there is no easy way to measure success. As I say to a lot of people, there are no unit tests for "fun". In the end, people contributing to a game project don't want to hear that their game ideas suck, which most (even mine) do. It takes a serious professional to sit down and refine ideas until they are workable before being released (which I hope mine are!) But, that's the "real work" of game development and the thing that tends to scare most wannabe game developers away once they get a taste of a real project.
My thoughts.
Re:Power of community + run by the community?
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Tabula Rasa To Shut Down
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· Score: 2, Informative
It makes me wonder if an open-source MMO might one day not only rival the current big commercial ones, but even become far more long lived than any of them because its community would last forever, and it could never get shut down, regardless of perceived success or failure.
In a word: No. This has been tried many times before. Perhaps the most notable project has been WorldForge (http://worldforge.org/).
For a bit of background, I've been developing MMO games professionally for over a decade, and did text MUD coding in college starting in 1993. I currently own and operate the MMO Meridian 59, a game that originally launched in 1996. So, I have some idea of what is required for making an MMO game. I'm also a professional who has shown a personal interest in maintaining an online game world even after it was originally shut down; 3DO shut down the game in 2000, and my business partner and I bought the rights to the game and re-launched it. Let me tell you, that has turned out to be a somewhat thankless task.
The main problem with a "community MMO" as you suggest is that you need a strong, central vision for the game. You can't just have a bunch of people working on things and hope it comes together as a cohesive project at the end. You need someone like Linus with Linux, someone who can direct the path of the project. These types of people tend to be fairly rare, though.
Another major problem is that MMO games aren't just technological, they're also creative. One part of being a professional game designer is being able to realize that most of your ideas suck. It's easy to sit around and spitball ideas all day, but refining them and turning them into something that can be implemented into a fun game is a pretty rare skill. And, most people contributing to the project probably don't want to hear, "Your game ideas suck, stick to coding." The reason a coder would work on a game rather than another project is probably because you want to have input on the formation of the game. Again, you need that strong, central vision to keep things going.
Finally, game development is really hard. I've tried to start up a lot of small-scale projects in the past, bootstrapping the project instead of getting a questionable deal on funding form publishers. Of the few dozen people I've interacted with in the past few years, about 95% of them have flaked out on me. Most of them weren't experienced game developers, so when the real work reared its ugly head, they were suddenly scarce. As I said above, it's easy to sit around and spitball different ideas to see what might stick, but actually turning that idle chatter into an actual game is much more difficult than people realize. Without a paycheck, it's hard to keep people productive when the "real work" starts.
...the MMO feeling is there despite the server requirements being not much different to those of an IRC server.
You're pretty off-base here. I'm not saying MMO servers are horribly complex (the server for Meridian 59 can be (and has been) run on my laptop), but they require a bit more than your typical IRC server, particularly if you want to support more than a few hundred people on a server. Most of the gameplay is calculated on the server, mostly to help reduce the effects of cheating. That's one of the reasons why a "distributed peer-to-peer" MMO is unlikely to work, unless you come up with some sure-fire way to prevent cheating. Given how much people have complained about WoW's Warden system on Slashdot in the past, that's a tall order to fill.
Some thoughts from someone who has some experience.
Yeah, the problem is that the Hellgate assets were put up as collateral for millions of dollars in loans. It's not impossible that they might take a small sum of money to do open source, but that seems unlikely if the company thinks they can run the game to make more money than that.
Also note that many times games have licensed stuff from third parties that must be re-licensed. That makes open sourcing everything much more difficult. If the game used stock sounds (which many games do), then those assets would have to be re-licensed or replaced. There are a lot of issues to consider, still.
Actually, the game assets were put into escrow as assets against investment from other companies. I don't remember if this "Redbana" is the investor, but there's someone that is interested and has a claim against the assets. So, no open sourcing for this game. Plus, consider that open sourcing a project like a game of this scale is not a non-trivial bit of work.
Substitute "television" for "games" and that's something I could have written. Full disclosure: I'm a professional game developer.
When I was young, I watched waaaay too much TV. I got glasses young because my parents noticed me getting really close to the TV while watching it. I didn't have cable most of the time growing up, so I watched whatever was on the broadcast waves. I watched cartoons, sitcoms, anything and everything.
But, I got better. In college I started being a lot more social and got into D&D and MUDs in college. I stopped watching TV, to the point where I just used the TV for my console systems.
Honestly, I think paying for TV in the U.S. is kinda stupid. Only reason I have satellite is because a majority of people in the house want it. I'll go watch shows to be social, but I think the satellite bill is wasted money every month. I'd rather go rent or buy some DVDs with good programs on them to watch at my own pace and get features like commentaries. But, I understand that some people do enjoy watching various TV programs, even though I don't.
So, I'll spend more time playing games, developing games, and posting on Slashdot instead of watching TV. But, unlike the parent post, I don't think everyone should be just like me. I'll happily pay $15/month for an MMO subscription compared to more for the satellite bill.
I'm an online game developer and I looked into doing pre-paid cards a few years ago for my own game, Meridian 59.
Parent post gets it right. It's not a scam, because companies make less money from the pre-paid cards than they do on direct sales. Take a WoW pre-paid card, for example; a $30 card gets you 2 months of play, but the company has paid anywhere between 30-50% of the face value to create, distribute, and provide retail markup for the card. (At least, those were the figures I was quoted when looking into it.) A retail store probably buys that $30 card for $15-20, so the company is making a lot less money on the card compared to the player pulling out a credit card and paying directly.
Really, the cards are to get people that might not play otherwise: people without credit cards, who don't want to use credit cards online, or whatever reason. They're convenient for a lot of people, so they buy them and the company makes more money than they would have otherwise.
Some insight from someone who understand both parts of the equation.
Haha, same here. The only reason I think I passed my 2nd semester C++ class was because I learned LPC as a wizard that semester. I'm still not sure if "this_player()" showed up on any of my code answers for the final in that class! And, as someone else mentioned in this thread, I learned to type as fast as I do on MUDs. My pseudonym came about because I wanted a hard-to-type name on a PK MUD. Heh.
I thought it was mostly time wasted, too, until I realized how much I had learned. These days I'm an online computer game developer (I own the game Meridian 59 and have a professional blog at http://www.psychochild.org/). It's been quite a trip.:)
No, it does not, because loading something into memory on the same system should not violate copyright. Distributing it to a third party should be a violation.
You'll notice that it's called copyright, not distributeright. If I borrow/steal a book from you and photocopy that book, I've still violated copyright even if I don't distribute that photocopy to a third party. Of course, there are exceptions for fair use; if you want to get righteously angry about something, there's a better thing to fight for.
If you wanted to be technical about it, the act in question does make the program available to a third party: the WoWGlider program. So, it's still a violation even according to your incorrect re-definition of copyright.
In the end, Blizzard wants to maintain the game as the other players expect it to be played, and they're using well-established law (copyright) to do so. If you can't abide by the rules, don't play. The other players thank you for not messing up their game experience.
The same way that distributing a program under the GPL is legitimate if you provide the source, but it violates the license if you don't provide the source.
The GPL says, "You can only distribute the program if you provide the source." Blizzard's Terms of Service say, "You only have a license to load our program into memory to play the game legitimately."
Let's head way off topic.;) While I appreciate a fellow geek trying to educate others, the problem is that insurance is often an emotional issue. Your ability in actuarial science lets you see the purely logical point of view.
Consider that the insurance most people interact with are: health (which you admit is fucked up), home (lots of stories about "except that's not covered"), car (required by law in most states) and worker's compensation (expensive and known for fraud). None of these are really known for being something people enjoy for the sake of enjoyment; rather, they're mostly something people get because they have to.
Now, add on top of this the unscrupulous people that take advantage of the situations (like all the insurers that didn't pay claims during some of the big hurricanes) and you have a lot of resentment on an emotional level. If I just lost my home to a hurricane, I don't want to hear how "flooding isn't covered because of blah, blah, blah", I want to know why the fuck I was paying your company all that money to protect my house and now you're not doing it; the whole BS about, "it was more the storm surge than the wind that destroyed your house" sounds like a complete cop-out to the affected homeowner. The answers just don't resonate on a basic level for the homeowner.
So, I'll agree with you wholeheartedly that insurance is a great thing and it's even better when it works as everyone expects. Unfortunately, a lot of times it's the details that cause the problems on an emotional level.
The reason why being "art" is important is because of the issue of legitimacy. (That's a link to an article I wrote to explain the issue more.) As a game developer, being considered a legitimate medium is nice because it means I don't have to lie and say I'm a crack dealer to get any respect from other people.;) It also helps because then we wouldn't have to put up with so much government B.S. about "protecting the children" from the evils of video games; we wouldn't put up with politicians banning books, and we shouldn't for video games, either.
So, while it's nice to know that people play and enjoy a game I worked on, I'd rather make it so that my works have the same protection in game form that the would have in just about any other creative medium. That's why "games as art" is important to us. It's more than just having stuffy academics glance a bit less disdainfully in our direction.
I'm an MMO developer, and believe me, people have been working on this problem much longer than the 10 minutes it took you to think of that comment on Slashdot. If there were a solution that easy to reach, it would have been done and shared across all possible games a long time ago. Contrary to popular belief, MMO developers aren't drooling morons. Well, most aren't, anyway.
[S]ince when has "it's hard" been a valid excuse in engineering?
Since code sucks at determining human intent. Hell, humans have trouble telling intent, so what chance does code have?
Examples: My high level character giving your low level character money because we're friends is good, because it builds a social bond in the game. A gold farmer's high level character giving your low level character because you bought the money is bad, because that disrupts the game.
Exact same action, very different effect on the game world. Code has a very hard time telling the difference between these two actions.
I'm an MMO developer, so I can speak with a bit of authority here.
We're talking about something that takes a GM seconds to judge here.
First, nothing takes seconds. A GM gets a report, then s/he has to look at the logs. What are the conditions under which the mail was sent? Was this a paying customer playing a stupid joke that a friend didn't get? Is this a gold farmer creating a noise to gum up the system? Is this the same idiot who keeps using the "report spam" button instead of the "delete" button, but might actually be a legitimate complaint this time? There are plenty of mundane reasons why this would take longer than "seconds".
Second, you have no idea of the scale in the larger games. Let's say it takes 1 minute to review a complaint. All it takes is 1440 complaints to take up one GM's 8-hour workday (without breaks). That's less than 1/10th of one percent of WoW's North American playerbase, and ignores other CS issues like tech support, billing problems, etc. Realistically, each incident probably takes at least 10 minutes, so you're looking at needing 10 times the number of GMs to handle the problem. And, given the problems with gold farming in WoW, I wouldn't be surprised if they got 1500 complaints per hour about gold farming under this type of system.
Some perspective from someone who has some experience in this area.
This means that you need a critical mass of people who are, in fact, playing 40 to 60 hours a week, a hardcore contingent, to provide much of that sense of persistence and mutual recognition.
No. MMOs need people to be online, but we don't need them to be on for long periods of time. During "peak hours", a game has between 10-30% of the total active accounts online once it has matured. So, people will be online during most of the time. Also note that "critical mass" is much lower than "expected populations" for a well designed game. For my own game, Meridian 59, critical mass on a server appears to be about 30 or so players online, so in my case I don't need to snare a large number of people to keep the game reasonably healthy.
Also, note that the average person in WoW spends about 2 hours per day in the game. (Reference: Blizzard vs. WoWGlider lawsuit, quote at: http://elitistjerks.com/f15/t28385-blizzard_wins_lawsuit_against_wowglider/#post812739) If we were looking at a true epidemic here, I would think that the largest game would have figures that were much higher than the average hours of TV watched if we accept that TV watching is not similarly addicting. The 40-60 hour per week people are statistical outliers, many sigma away from the average. In WoW, every person playing 40 hours per week needs 3 people playing only 1 hour per week to balance things out to the average.
And, carefully consider what you are saying. Your core argument in this post is that socializing and feeling like you have social obligations is bad. Few rational people are going to agree with that position. The fact that people do engage in social activities online is a good thing. The fact that people do stupid things in social situations, such as when trying to find a potential mate, doesn't mean that the activity is generally harmful. It means that some people just need a bit more help than others.
I compared you to the alcohol industry, and I think that comparison is accurate. Beer and wine manufacturers do not design their products to exploit alcoholism - yet they continue to market their products to populations who are, in fact, alcoholic. That 90% of the population can drink alcohol responsibly doesn't make alcoholism any less real.
As I said in a previous post, the comparison is wrong because there are no problems such as "driving under the influence" or "liver poisoning" with MMOs. Alcohol can be physically addicting, while MMOs have no physically addicting properties by definition. There are also significant positive elements to participating in online interaction as explained in Nick Yee's studies; alcohol has no similar benefits besides some possible health benefits in strict moderation. So, in my considered opinion, the comparison is incorrect on just about every level.
In the end, if you're not willing to take a psychological researcher as an authority in this area, you must be fairly set in your opinion and discussion will devolve into circular arguments. I hope you can continue to reach out to the people you've seen have troubles while playing MMOs; I also hope you can keep an open enough mind to understand that their core problems may be something beyond just the nature of the game.
You're not owning to the element of MMOs that are distinctive: their unclosed, open-ended, more-time-you-put-in-more-reward-you-get-out nature, and I've seen the consequences of it at work in the lives of people around me, more so than with sports or television or film or books by a long shot.
No, I'm saying that the open-ended aspect is not nearly as important as the social aspects. Even though you can solo just fine in most recent MMO games, if you were to take out all the other people you would not have a compelling game. This is a significant problem for MMO games; you need a "critical mass" of people to keep the game interesting, and if your game falls below that number of people then the world starts to feel empty.
As far as the number of people you've seen affected, I'm going to assume since you're engaging in a discussion on Slashdot and have a 4 digit UID that you're a technologically-minded person. So, you should understand that yes, you are going to see a lot more people have troubles involving technology. A bartender is going to see a lot more people harmed by alcohol than MMOs, but it wouldn't be accurate to treat that bartender's experiences as authoritative when comparing the relative affects, either.
What I have seen is people who had balanced lives before they started playing, but then lost those balanced lives.
As people on Slashdot are fond of saying: correlation does not imply causation. Did people lose their balanced lives by playing the games as you assert, or did people have lives start to become unbalanced then become attracted to MMOs where they found a way to avoid dealing with their increasingly unbalanced lives?
Calling them "compelling" is disingenuous in the extreme, because it pretends that it is the fictional, fantastic nature that keeps people playing for 20 to 60 hours a week over several years, when you can log into any end-game forum and see that it really is about camping, high-end-raids, drops, and that entire cycle of seeking the next item.
If progress were the only compelling part of the game, then Progress Quest (http://progressquest.com/) would be just as compelling as WoW. It's not, although it's a humorous take on these types of games. The advancement that you focus on is only really important in a social context. Gaining levels and killing different colored enemies with bigger numbers has been a staple of computer and console RPGs since Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy were introduced. But, once you add the social element of MMOs, that's where the advancement becomes meaningful. My 70th level character becomes more impressive when you compare it to other characters in the game. In some cases, it's to show who has the biggest when looking down on lower level characters; in other cases, it's showing that the player is the "minimum height" required to join with other people to engage in those high end raids. The person solely concerned with loot and not with the other people in the group quickly find themselves without the group required to get all that cool loot in the "end game".
I'm not some school-marm who doesn't know one end of the controller from another: I've been playing MMOs since the days of LPMUDs and DikuMUDS, and I've seen the way they can play out.
And, to continue the metaphor, you're not dealing with some mustache-twirling villain looking to make a quick buck selling crack to unsuspecting children. I've done a lot of soul-searching and investigation into these issues and have read available information. I've had many friends from my MUD playing days fail out of university; I could say some failed out because they played too many MUDs, but really they were looking for any escape from their problems, including D&D, partying, or any of the other things they did in addition to MUDding in lieu of schoolwork. Some just couldn't hack college, but felt under a lot of pressure to attend college by their parents, for example, and they used MUDs and other a
A lot of people can drink - and even do cocaine and heroin, occassionally - without ruining their lives.
As soon as "Driving under the influence (of MMO games)" becomes a societal problem, I'll agree that we should classify these all in the same category. An alcoholic (or other substance abuser) is often physically addicted to the substance they abuse, and this causes additional problems when trying to break the addiction. In addition, the alcoholic also makes poor decisions, such as deciding to drive while their reactions are impaired, which causes direct physical harm to others on a regular basis. Trying to equate someone who plays too many games and may later regrets it to someone causing physical damage to themselves and potentially to others when abusing a substance seems to trivialize the problems of substance abuse.
Now, if you want to compare MMOs to other media, this is a lot closer to the mark. Some people watch TV to excess; the old stereotype was about the husband who came home and watched TV to ignore his wife, causing their marriage to fail. Sometimes introverted teenagers turn to books and seclude themselves from others while reading for hours upon hours; I know I did frequently. Where is your outcry for people who abuse those media? And, spare me the "worthwhile" argument; the most mindless game I've enjoyed had a lot more redeeming value than some of the garbage Star Trek novels I read as a teenager.
And, again, the reason why MMO games are singled out from other games, as they were in this particular discussion thread, is because of the social interaction and feedback that appeals to people. It's the same reason why people like talking on the phone, going to parties, watching football games with friends, or engaging in other very normal, socially-accepted activities that are also very enjoyable. The supreme irony here is the fact that some people think the internet isolates people instead of providing social opportunities.
I know a lot of people in the MMO dev business, so don't take it too strongly when I say that you're in the alcohol business.
Sorry, I'm not. I have friends that regularly get together and watch whole seasons of TV shows on DVDs for hours on end many nights per week. TV shows are meant to be compelling, making you want to watch one episode after another. The easy availability of TV shows on DVD means that you can watch a nearly endless number of shows. So, are DVD sellers also in "the alcohol business"? If so, then you're proving the, "I'm addicted to EATING!" crowd right in that the definition of "addiction" is no longer meaningful if it applies to anything someone likes to do. If not, then what is the significant difference? The only meaningful difference I can think of is the interactive nature of games compared to passive media; and, sorry, I have a hard time believing that all entertainment should be passively engaged just because a few people would rather play games than face the grim facts of their deteriorating relationship (or whatever other problem they're ignoring).
And, really, sports have caused the destruction of more relationships and caused significantly more real-world violence than video games have. So, why are you talking so negatively about MMOs and the like but not sports? Perhaps because the typical MMO player is a lot less willing to break your face than the aggressive football fanatic?;)
Caveats: I am not a researcher or psychologist. I am an MMO developer.
The major problem I have with the "addictive" label is that it makes a value judgment. There are few things that are "addictive" that are considered good things; the big exception is computer gaming, where the word is often used with a positive connotation. An "addicting" game is awesome! A better word would be "compelling", which has less judgment associated with it.
The research observed that while people were playing, they identified the relationships with other players in-game as meaningful, but when they stopped playing, they ceased to describe it as such. To me, that is a lot like a heavy drinker's "bar friendships" - when they stop drinking, those friendships mean a lot less.
One issue to consider is that some people who "get addicted" and lose themselves into a game, particularly an MMO with social connections, have very serious problems with the rest of their life. Often, these people have a case of depression. The interaction with other people online can provide a lot of benefits that help counteract the problem the person is experiencing. For example, if you feel worthless at work because you've been passed over for promotion after promotion, then you probably really like the feeling of being a needed and appreciated member of the party/raid in a game.
If the external condition changes, that can cause a re-evaluation of your situation. If the person above is recognized as a capable worker and gets a promotion in their job, he or she may not seek validation through the game anymore. So, the online relationships may become less important to the individual because they don't need it anymore. I don't see this as any different than forming a new circle of friends when your life circumstances change. The promoted person in our example may start making new friends and have less time for old friends that he or she doesn't come into contact as often. This is seen as fairly natural when we don't include the scary "online" or "gaming" aspect.
Also consider that the person who plays MMOs to the point where their relationship falls apart may already have problems with that relationship. They may be getting something from their online play that is lacking in their offline relationship. Yeah, it's better to address issues head-on and try to resolve them, but many people will avoid problems if they can. The game is just a convenient excuse.
The defensiveness by gamers when confronted with this sort of analysis is depressingly predictable, as well.
Well, sure. People do tend to get defensive when someone points a finger and says, "You're doing the bad thing!" Witness all the excuses that come up during a typical copyright discussion on Slashdot.
Most people can play games without it impacting their life. For the people that do become "addicted", how many of them are using gaming (or anything else) to fill a problem in their life? This is less of a problem with gaming a more of a problem with society. But, it's easier to blame the game than to expect people to change. So, for those of us that can game without letting it rule our lives, it gets a bit tiresome to see gaming demonized so easily.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimers: I'm an online game developer, but I don't speak for Blizzard, etc.
I'm sure they don't, because it would be stupid. A joke that online game devs tell is that our perfect customer subscribes to our game but never plays; that way we get all the revenue and none of the cost. Someone spending many, many hours in our game is actually a cost, and drives up the likelihood of them needing customer service (the expensive part of running an online game). So, there's less benefit to getting people hopelessly addicted to our games.
The thing that does keep people playing our games is the one thing we're talking about here: socialization. It's the social obligations that people feel to the other players in the game that usually keep them playing long term. Honestly, the game gets a bit old after a while; it's the people that keep it interesting.
If you're interested in some real research on this, take a look at Nick Yee's site on MMO research.
Actually, some people do. Even before the easy availability of plugins like Auctioneer, there were people who bought and sold goods to try to control markets. Some were very successful. For some people, doing arbitrage on the auction hall was more rewarding (especially in money earned) than "playing" the game as intended.
Also, having a player economy satisfies a lot of other design requirements as well. For example, it provides one way to give crafters a ready market. In the old EQ games, tradeskills were seen as a money sink to get some good items. In WoW, most tradeskills can derive some profit if you put in enough effort; but, two gathering skills are the sure ticket to some extra cash. I'm interested to see what happens with enchanting now that they can effectively put enchants up on the AH. One of my friends just made 800 or so gold from posting enchants on the AH; he has no patience for selling his wares in town, so that's money he probably wouldn't have made anyway.
Well, as you point out, the problem is that by "improving" those areas they took out a lot of what people consider the "living world" aspects. Tough travel means that the world feels (and stays) larger, even thought it means you don't get to hop all over the world for some silly quest; it also sometimes means that you and your friend don't get to start playing together too easily, a definite drawback.
One thing most developers realized after games started reducing downtime is that the "downtime" was actually "social time" in MMOs. It was the time when people talked to each other and learned more about each other and formed friendships. Compare this with "PUGs" in WoW where people want to group, accomplish a goal, then leave as quickly as possible. That is, if they even group at all. I've made no long term friends in WoW, other than some of the people I chat with that were in the raiding guild I joined for a bit this year. Raids have more downtime, so there is more time to chat and make friends.
Yeah, it's not something that CCP obviously brags about. :) But, that's the reason why I keep telling people that they really have to support indie developers if they want to see indie games. Most companies can't do what CCP did with EVE. If you don't support the independent game makers, then we will die out and you'll only be left with WoW clones. The problem is, most people who really want something different aren't willing to put up with something that isn't as polished and attractive as the newer games. That leads to the paradox: people won't play a game without a large budget, and games with large budgets rarely try anything radical or niche. You have to ask yourself: do you want to play something pretty, or do you want to play something different? You're not going to get both anytime soon. That's the truth, beyond trying to get people to play my game (or future ones!) ;)
More thoughts from an indie MMO developer.
What I meant was that WoW was produced for the masses. McDonald's became popular because the food was cheap, available, and offensive to pretty much nobody. (Note that reputation has changed over time.) What does Blizzard do best? Take popular, established gameplay then polish it to high shine. The reason why WoW shuns the "living world" aspects the grandparent post was talking about is because that's a niche interest compared to streamlining the process of killing things and taking their stuff.
People said the same thing about EverQuest before WoW. Of course, the thing that proves more successful than WoW may be another Blizzard MMO. ;)
*raises eyebrow*
Sorry, best I can do right now. Plus, I'm sure someone with fewer digits will be along sometime soon. I'll let them give you the works.
My pleasure. I enjoy a good discussion about an area I'm pretty passionate about.
I don't know much about Cube/Sauerbraten, so I can't comment on it directly. I will say that it's nowhere near as complex as an MMO. The game boasts 7 weapons, whereas Meridian 59, which is hardly the largest game, has 13 melee weapons, 4 ranged weapons, and over 150 individual spells that all have to be balanced against each other. It has many, many rooms, which are about as complex as DOOM 1 levels, all interconnected. Now, imagine a game like WoW that has hundreds of weapons, armors, spells, stats, etc.
But, let me give an example of what I was talking about: MUDs.
Text MUDs were the predecessors to modern MMO games. They were entirely text-based, but they shared a lot of features with modern MMO games. The two primary game-focused ones were LP-MUDs (which allowed user programming on the fly) and DIKU MUDs. DIKU MUDs were a lot more popular for two reasons: there was only one administrator and the popular verions had a game world right out of the box. LP-MUDs had a tradition of allowing the top players to become Wizards (coders) on the game, and you usually had to write most of the game world yourself. The shared administration duties caused a lot of schisms, and probably at least half of the LP MUDs out there were formed when someone got into an argument and took a copy of the existing game to create their own version of the game.
And, in games where you had a variety of people working on them, you often had special issues. For example, every new player wanted to have the "best" area, which mean that you had to have something special in your area that was more desireable. Perhaps the most powerful weapon or armor, so you had the original cause of "mudflation". Or, you had one person working on an X-Men themed area right next to one area with Ninjas and another area parodying My Little Pony. A far cry from the (mostly) coherent storylines found in current graphical games.
MUDs used to be what people who wanted to do an online game made back in the day. There were a lot of them, and the best ones (and most of the ones that still exist today) had very strong, central authorities to support them.
One other thing to consider: What is the weakest area of open source development? Usually the documentation. It's not sexy and few people really want to do it. However, game development is about 50% documentation (that is, the game design). I noticed Sauerbraten has a Wiki, so it's ahead of that game. But, look at the documentation the vast majority of open source projects out there; the documentation only becomes mature once the project has been out there long enough. That's death for a large scale game like an MMO.
We're talking an MMO here, though, not something like a personal Neverwinter Nights server. The difference is trying to run a D&D game for your friends vs. trying to run D&D games for a convention. If you just want to play with your friends, then you're not talking about an MMO anymore. Not to say that something like a game server where you could play with your friends wouldn't be cool, but it's not the same.
So, there's some clarification on my points. I think the differences between a multiplayer FPS and an MMO is important. In fact, the first "M" stands for "massively", which was intended to separate these games from the 16 player FPS servers that were available back in the day.
Now, all this isn't to say that I think a community project would never work or that I wouldn't support one. I know a few of the WorldForge people and really respect them for the work they've done. But, I've heard from them first-hand about the issues they've faced.
More of my thoughts.
It depends on what the goal of the mechanic is. In the case of WoW, it streamlines the experience and lets people get to the "fun parts" of building up a character faster. So, in this instance, it's actually a rousing success. You're arguing that it takes away something that you value: the feeling of a living world. But I don't think that goal, as you would define it, was ever an intention of WoW. Therefore, you can't say the auction houses are fundamentally flawed as the apply to WoW.
Exactly. And, know what? A lot of old-school MMO game players heralded that as a success. It gets people to the "fun parts" of the game. It doesn't make the game feel like "a grind". People have welcomed this with open arms. WoW has, by far, the largest subscriber base in North America of any game; the masses have spoken, and they like that type of game. (Not to downplay the market power of the "Blizzard" and "Warcraft" names, though, since those helped a lot.)
Unfortunately, the grim business reality is that most projects are going to want to aim for this market. Back when EQ1 was the king of the roost, people wanted MMO projects to be "more like EverQuest!" Now that WoW is top of the heap in terms of subscribers, people want that. Especially the people funding these projects, because they want to make what Blizzard is making off of WoW. That means things like having what feels like a "living world" is not usually a concern for MMO game developers, specially the ones getting big funding from game companies.
EVE proves nothing of the sort. EVE was a commercial failure when it launched, the publisher dropped the project quickly after launch. For most companies, this would have been death. CCP, the developers of EVE, got funding from the goverment of Iceland, and thus were able to re-acquire the rights to the game and stay in business. EVE was able to stick with development and enjoy some modest success for being a game that didn't try to directly copy EQ or WoW. But, it took a pretty special set of circumstances for the game to survive and thrive. A lot of niche games aren't so lucky.
This is why I made a big deal about people having to accept that a niche game isn't going to be as large, high quality, and/or as cheap as mainstream games. WoW is like McDonalds: it serves millions and millions, but it's not the best food you'll ever eat. If you want something more healthy and tasty, you aren't going to be able to only spend 99 cents for your hamburger; likewise, if you want something that isn't built to cater to the largest market possible, get ready to have to accept some compromises.
To be fair, most people play these games for diversion. So, they tend to want to get into the fun quickly. Being able to head to the auction house and then fly to my destination is easier than traveling for an hour or more to the accepted trading location and bartering with people. That is, assuming you got the memo about where the accepted location is if the game developers haven't set aside a location.
Richard Bartle, co-author of the first text MUD, wrote about this. He pointed out that design ideas can be good or bad in the long or short term. Many games tend to have a lot of features that are good in the short term, even if they are bad in the long term. It's also hard to introduce a feature that is bad in the short term but good in the long term. So, removing the auction house and putting in player trade stalls might be a good long term feature, but it'd hurt in the short term so there is no way that WoW would do that. And, now that WoW has set the standard, not including an auction house would be a short term negative for a possible long term benefit; in other words, it won't work because players will complain about the short term pain.
IMHO, the solution here is to start making smaller-scale MMOs. There are enough people that share your tastes that a game could be made to cater to you. There are two issues to overcome: first, you have to realize that you will be playing a niche game instead of a large one, and that means you're not going to get a game with a $50 million budget. Second, you have to accept that you'll probably have to pay a bit more for the game in order to make the game appealing in a financial sense. For now, it's mostly going to be small, independent developers (like me!) looking to service the niche, and we still have to eat and pay rent.
Some thoughts from a professional MMO developer.
I do game development for a living, not kernel development. But, I agree game development is pretty difficult. As I mentioned in a reply to the post parent to yours, the big issue is that game development has a large creative component in addition to the technical issues, and creativity relies on opinion. If you and I disagree on a task scheduling system, we can each build our systems and then run tests to see who has the superior result for the situations we are likely to encounter. If you and I have a different idea for gameplay, particularly if it's something fundamental to the game like going with a class and level system vs. a skill-based system, it's hard to build the systems in any reasonable time frame and there is no easy way to measure success. As I say to a lot of people, there are no unit tests for "fun". In the end, people contributing to a game project don't want to hear that their game ideas suck, which most (even mine) do. It takes a serious professional to sit down and refine ideas until they are workable before being released (which I hope mine are!) But, that's the "real work" of game development and the thing that tends to scare most wannabe game developers away once they get a taste of a real project.
My thoughts.
In a word: No. This has been tried many times before. Perhaps the most notable project has been WorldForge (http://worldforge.org/).
For a bit of background, I've been developing MMO games professionally for over a decade, and did text MUD coding in college starting in 1993. I currently own and operate the MMO Meridian 59 , a game that originally launched in 1996. So, I have some idea of what is required for making an MMO game. I'm also a professional who has shown a personal interest in maintaining an online game world even after it was originally shut down; 3DO shut down the game in 2000, and my business partner and I bought the rights to the game and re-launched it. Let me tell you, that has turned out to be a somewhat thankless task.
The main problem with a "community MMO" as you suggest is that you need a strong, central vision for the game. You can't just have a bunch of people working on things and hope it comes together as a cohesive project at the end. You need someone like Linus with Linux, someone who can direct the path of the project. These types of people tend to be fairly rare, though.
Another major problem is that MMO games aren't just technological, they're also creative. One part of being a professional game designer is being able to realize that most of your ideas suck. It's easy to sit around and spitball ideas all day, but refining them and turning them into something that can be implemented into a fun game is a pretty rare skill. And, most people contributing to the project probably don't want to hear, "Your game ideas suck, stick to coding." The reason a coder would work on a game rather than another project is probably because you want to have input on the formation of the game. Again, you need that strong, central vision to keep things going.
Finally, game development is really hard. I've tried to start up a lot of small-scale projects in the past, bootstrapping the project instead of getting a questionable deal on funding form publishers. Of the few dozen people I've interacted with in the past few years, about 95% of them have flaked out on me. Most of them weren't experienced game developers, so when the real work reared its ugly head, they were suddenly scarce. As I said above, it's easy to sit around and spitball different ideas to see what might stick, but actually turning that idle chatter into an actual game is much more difficult than people realize. Without a paycheck, it's hard to keep people productive when the "real work" starts.
You're pretty off-base here. I'm not saying MMO servers are horribly complex (the server for Meridian 59 can be (and has been) run on my laptop), but they require a bit more than your typical IRC server, particularly if you want to support more than a few hundred people on a server. Most of the gameplay is calculated on the server, mostly to help reduce the effects of cheating. That's one of the reasons why a "distributed peer-to-peer" MMO is unlikely to work, unless you come up with some sure-fire way to prevent cheating. Given how much people have complained about WoW's Warden system on Slashdot in the past, that's a tall order to fill.
Some thoughts from someone who has some experience.
Yeah, the problem is that the Hellgate assets were put up as collateral for millions of dollars in loans. It's not impossible that they might take a small sum of money to do open source, but that seems unlikely if the company thinks they can run the game to make more money than that.
Also note that many times games have licensed stuff from third parties that must be re-licensed. That makes open sourcing everything much more difficult. If the game used stock sounds (which many games do), then those assets would have to be re-licensed or replaced. There are a lot of issues to consider, still.
Some more insight.
Actually, the game assets were put into escrow as assets against investment from other companies. I don't remember if this "Redbana" is the investor, but there's someone that is interested and has a claim against the assets. So, no open sourcing for this game. Plus, consider that open sourcing a project like a game of this scale is not a non-trivial bit of work.
Anyway, the whole situation with Hellgate and Flagship was a pretty fucked up affair. You can see an interview with Bill Roper here: http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=0&cId=3169356. I also wrote a book about business and legal issues: Business & Legal Primer for Game Development , which would give you some insight into the business and legal issues in game development.
Substitute "television" for "games" and that's something I could have written. Full disclosure: I'm a professional game developer.
When I was young, I watched waaaay too much TV. I got glasses young because my parents noticed me getting really close to the TV while watching it. I didn't have cable most of the time growing up, so I watched whatever was on the broadcast waves. I watched cartoons, sitcoms, anything and everything.
But, I got better. In college I started being a lot more social and got into D&D and MUDs in college. I stopped watching TV, to the point where I just used the TV for my console systems.
Honestly, I think paying for TV in the U.S. is kinda stupid. Only reason I have satellite is because a majority of people in the house want it. I'll go watch shows to be social, but I think the satellite bill is wasted money every month. I'd rather go rent or buy some DVDs with good programs on them to watch at my own pace and get features like commentaries. But, I understand that some people do enjoy watching various TV programs, even though I don't.
So, I'll spend more time playing games, developing games, and posting on Slashdot instead of watching TV. But, unlike the parent post, I don't think everyone should be just like me. I'll happily pay $15/month for an MMO subscription compared to more for the satellite bill.
My thoughts,
I'm an online game developer and I looked into doing pre-paid cards a few years ago for my own game, Meridian 59 .
Parent post gets it right. It's not a scam, because companies make less money from the pre-paid cards than they do on direct sales. Take a WoW pre-paid card, for example; a $30 card gets you 2 months of play, but the company has paid anywhere between 30-50% of the face value to create, distribute, and provide retail markup for the card. (At least, those were the figures I was quoted when looking into it.) A retail store probably buys that $30 card for $15-20, so the company is making a lot less money on the card compared to the player pulling out a credit card and paying directly.
Really, the cards are to get people that might not play otherwise: people without credit cards, who don't want to use credit cards online, or whatever reason. They're convenient for a lot of people, so they buy them and the company makes more money than they would have otherwise.
Some insight from someone who understand both parts of the equation.
Haha, same here. The only reason I think I passed my 2nd semester C++ class was because I learned LPC as a wizard that semester. I'm still not sure if "this_player()" showed up on any of my code answers for the final in that class! And, as someone else mentioned in this thread, I learned to type as fast as I do on MUDs. My pseudonym came about because I wanted a hard-to-type name on a PK MUD. Heh.
I thought it was mostly time wasted, too, until I realized how much I had learned. These days I'm an online computer game developer (I own the game Meridian 59 and have a professional blog at http://www.psychochild.org/). It's been quite a trip. :)
No, it does not, because loading something into memory on the same system should not violate copyright. Distributing it to a third party should be a violation.
You'll notice that it's called copyright, not distributeright. If I borrow/steal a book from you and photocopy that book, I've still violated copyright even if I don't distribute that photocopy to a third party. Of course, there are exceptions for fair use; if you want to get righteously angry about something, there's a better thing to fight for.
If you wanted to be technical about it, the act in question does make the program available to a third party: the WoWGlider program. So, it's still a violation even according to your incorrect re-definition of copyright.
In the end, Blizzard wants to maintain the game as the other players expect it to be played, and they're using well-established law (copyright) to do so. If you can't abide by the rules, don't play. The other players thank you for not messing up their game experience.
The same way that distributing a program under the GPL is legitimate if you provide the source, but it violates the license if you don't provide the source.
The GPL says, "You can only distribute the program if you provide the source." Blizzard's Terms of Service say, "You only have a license to load our program into memory to play the game legitimately."
That clear it up for you?
Let's head way off topic. ;) While I appreciate a fellow geek trying to educate others, the problem is that insurance is often an emotional issue. Your ability in actuarial science lets you see the purely logical point of view.
Consider that the insurance most people interact with are: health (which you admit is fucked up), home (lots of stories about "except that's not covered"), car (required by law in most states) and worker's compensation (expensive and known for fraud). None of these are really known for being something people enjoy for the sake of enjoyment; rather, they're mostly something people get because they have to.
Now, add on top of this the unscrupulous people that take advantage of the situations (like all the insurers that didn't pay claims during some of the big hurricanes) and you have a lot of resentment on an emotional level. If I just lost my home to a hurricane, I don't want to hear how "flooding isn't covered because of blah, blah, blah", I want to know why the fuck I was paying your company all that money to protect my house and now you're not doing it; the whole BS about, "it was more the storm surge than the wind that destroyed your house" sounds like a complete cop-out to the affected homeowner. The answers just don't resonate on a basic level for the homeowner.
So, I'll agree with you wholeheartedly that insurance is a great thing and it's even better when it works as everyone expects. Unfortunately, a lot of times it's the details that cause the problems on an emotional level.
The reason why being "art" is important is because of the issue of legitimacy. (That's a link to an article I wrote to explain the issue more.) As a game developer, being considered a legitimate medium is nice because it means I don't have to lie and say I'm a crack dealer to get any respect from other people. ;) It also helps because then we wouldn't have to put up with so much government B.S. about "protecting the children" from the evils of video games; we wouldn't put up with politicians banning books, and we shouldn't for video games, either.
So, while it's nice to know that people play and enjoy a game I worked on, I'd rather make it so that my works have the same protection in game form that the would have in just about any other creative medium. That's why "games as art" is important to us. It's more than just having stuffy academics glance a bit less disdainfully in our direction.
Have fun,
I'm an MMO developer, and believe me, people have been working on this problem much longer than the 10 minutes it took you to think of that comment on Slashdot. If there were a solution that easy to reach, it would have been done and shared across all possible games a long time ago. Contrary to popular belief, MMO developers aren't drooling morons. Well, most aren't, anyway.
[S]ince when has "it's hard" been a valid excuse in engineering?
Since code sucks at determining human intent. Hell, humans have trouble telling intent, so what chance does code have?
Examples:
My high level character giving your low level character money because we're friends is good, because it builds a social bond in the game.
A gold farmer's high level character giving your low level character because you bought the money is bad, because that disrupts the game.
Exact same action, very different effect on the game world. Code has a very hard time telling the difference between these two actions.
So, uh, yeah, it is hard.
I'm an MMO developer, so I can speak with a bit of authority here.
We're talking about something that takes a GM seconds to judge here.
First, nothing takes seconds. A GM gets a report, then s/he has to look at the logs. What are the conditions under which the mail was sent? Was this a paying customer playing a stupid joke that a friend didn't get? Is this a gold farmer creating a noise to gum up the system? Is this the same idiot who keeps using the "report spam" button instead of the "delete" button, but might actually be a legitimate complaint this time? There are plenty of mundane reasons why this would take longer than "seconds".
Second, you have no idea of the scale in the larger games. Let's say it takes 1 minute to review a complaint. All it takes is 1440 complaints to take up one GM's 8-hour workday (without breaks). That's less than 1/10th of one percent of WoW's North American playerbase, and ignores other CS issues like tech support, billing problems, etc. Realistically, each incident probably takes at least 10 minutes, so you're looking at needing 10 times the number of GMs to handle the problem. And, given the problems with gold farming in WoW, I wouldn't be surprised if they got 1500 complaints per hour about gold farming under this type of system.
Some perspective from someone who has some experience in this area.
This means that you need a critical mass of people who are, in fact, playing 40 to 60 hours a week, a hardcore contingent, to provide much of that sense of persistence and mutual recognition.
No. MMOs need people to be online, but we don't need them to be on for long periods of time. During "peak hours", a game has between 10-30% of the total active accounts online once it has matured. So, people will be online during most of the time. Also note that "critical mass" is much lower than "expected populations" for a well designed game. For my own game, Meridian 59, critical mass on a server appears to be about 30 or so players online, so in my case I don't need to snare a large number of people to keep the game reasonably healthy.
Also, note that the average person in WoW spends about 2 hours per day in the game. (Reference: Blizzard vs. WoWGlider lawsuit, quote at: http://elitistjerks.com/f15/t28385-blizzard_wins_lawsuit_against_wowglider/#post812739) If we were looking at a true epidemic here, I would think that the largest game would have figures that were much higher than the average hours of TV watched if we accept that TV watching is not similarly addicting. The 40-60 hour per week people are statistical outliers, many sigma away from the average. In WoW, every person playing 40 hours per week needs 3 people playing only 1 hour per week to balance things out to the average.
And, carefully consider what you are saying. Your core argument in this post is that socializing and feeling like you have social obligations is bad. Few rational people are going to agree with that position. The fact that people do engage in social activities online is a good thing. The fact that people do stupid things in social situations, such as when trying to find a potential mate, doesn't mean that the activity is generally harmful. It means that some people just need a bit more help than others.
Have fun,
I compared you to the alcohol industry, and I think that comparison is accurate. Beer and wine manufacturers do not design their products to exploit alcoholism - yet they continue to market their products to populations who are, in fact, alcoholic. That 90% of the population can drink alcohol responsibly doesn't make alcoholism any less real.
As I said in a previous post, the comparison is wrong because there are no problems such as "driving under the influence" or "liver poisoning" with MMOs. Alcohol can be physically addicting, while MMOs have no physically addicting properties by definition. There are also significant positive elements to participating in online interaction as explained in Nick Yee's studies; alcohol has no similar benefits besides some possible health benefits in strict moderation. So, in my considered opinion, the comparison is incorrect on just about every level.
In the end, if you're not willing to take a psychological researcher as an authority in this area, you must be fairly set in your opinion and discussion will devolve into circular arguments. I hope you can continue to reach out to the people you've seen have troubles while playing MMOs; I also hope you can keep an open enough mind to understand that their core problems may be something beyond just the nature of the game.
Have fun,
You're not owning to the element of MMOs that are distinctive: their unclosed, open-ended, more-time-you-put-in-more-reward-you-get-out nature, and I've seen the consequences of it at work in the lives of people around me, more so than with sports or television or film or books by a long shot.
No, I'm saying that the open-ended aspect is not nearly as important as the social aspects. Even though you can solo just fine in most recent MMO games, if you were to take out all the other people you would not have a compelling game. This is a significant problem for MMO games; you need a "critical mass" of people to keep the game interesting, and if your game falls below that number of people then the world starts to feel empty.
As far as the number of people you've seen affected, I'm going to assume since you're engaging in a discussion on Slashdot and have a 4 digit UID that you're a technologically-minded person. So, you should understand that yes, you are going to see a lot more people have troubles involving technology. A bartender is going to see a lot more people harmed by alcohol than MMOs, but it wouldn't be accurate to treat that bartender's experiences as authoritative when comparing the relative affects, either.
What I have seen is people who had balanced lives before they started playing, but then lost those balanced lives.
As people on Slashdot are fond of saying: correlation does not imply causation. Did people lose their balanced lives by playing the games as you assert, or did people have lives start to become unbalanced then become attracted to MMOs where they found a way to avoid dealing with their increasingly unbalanced lives?
Calling them "compelling" is disingenuous in the extreme, because it pretends that it is the fictional, fantastic nature that keeps people playing for 20 to 60 hours a week over several years, when you can log into any end-game forum and see that it really is about camping, high-end-raids, drops, and that entire cycle of seeking the next item.
If progress were the only compelling part of the game, then Progress Quest (http://progressquest.com/) would be just as compelling as WoW. It's not, although it's a humorous take on these types of games. The advancement that you focus on is only really important in a social context. Gaining levels and killing different colored enemies with bigger numbers has been a staple of computer and console RPGs since Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy were introduced. But, once you add the social element of MMOs, that's where the advancement becomes meaningful. My 70th level character becomes more impressive when you compare it to other characters in the game. In some cases, it's to show who has the biggest when looking down on lower level characters; in other cases, it's showing that the player is the "minimum height" required to join with other people to engage in those high end raids. The person solely concerned with loot and not with the other people in the group quickly find themselves without the group required to get all that cool loot in the "end game".
I'm not some school-marm who doesn't know one end of the controller from another: I've been playing MMOs since the days of LPMUDs and DikuMUDS, and I've seen the way they can play out.
And, to continue the metaphor, you're not dealing with some mustache-twirling villain looking to make a quick buck selling crack to unsuspecting children. I've done a lot of soul-searching and investigation into these issues and have read available information. I've had many friends from my MUD playing days fail out of university; I could say some failed out because they played too many MUDs, but really they were looking for any escape from their problems, including D&D, partying, or any of the other things they did in addition to MUDding in lieu of schoolwork. Some just couldn't hack college, but felt under a lot of pressure to attend college by their parents, for example, and they used MUDs and other a
A lot of people can drink - and even do cocaine and heroin, occassionally - without ruining their lives.
As soon as "Driving under the influence (of MMO games)" becomes a societal problem, I'll agree that we should classify these all in the same category. An alcoholic (or other substance abuser) is often physically addicted to the substance they abuse, and this causes additional problems when trying to break the addiction. In addition, the alcoholic also makes poor decisions, such as deciding to drive while their reactions are impaired, which causes direct physical harm to others on a regular basis. Trying to equate someone who plays too many games and may later regrets it to someone causing physical damage to themselves and potentially to others when abusing a substance seems to trivialize the problems of substance abuse.
Now, if you want to compare MMOs to other media, this is a lot closer to the mark. Some people watch TV to excess; the old stereotype was about the husband who came home and watched TV to ignore his wife, causing their marriage to fail. Sometimes introverted teenagers turn to books and seclude themselves from others while reading for hours upon hours; I know I did frequently. Where is your outcry for people who abuse those media? And, spare me the "worthwhile" argument; the most mindless game I've enjoyed had a lot more redeeming value than some of the garbage Star Trek novels I read as a teenager.
And, again, the reason why MMO games are singled out from other games, as they were in this particular discussion thread, is because of the social interaction and feedback that appeals to people. It's the same reason why people like talking on the phone, going to parties, watching football games with friends, or engaging in other very normal, socially-accepted activities that are also very enjoyable. The supreme irony here is the fact that some people think the internet isolates people instead of providing social opportunities.
I know a lot of people in the MMO dev business, so don't take it too strongly when I say that you're in the alcohol business.
Sorry, I'm not. I have friends that regularly get together and watch whole seasons of TV shows on DVDs for hours on end many nights per week. TV shows are meant to be compelling, making you want to watch one episode after another. The easy availability of TV shows on DVD means that you can watch a nearly endless number of shows. So, are DVD sellers also in "the alcohol business"? If so, then you're proving the, "I'm addicted to EATING!" crowd right in that the definition of "addiction" is no longer meaningful if it applies to anything someone likes to do. If not, then what is the significant difference? The only meaningful difference I can think of is the interactive nature of games compared to passive media; and, sorry, I have a hard time believing that all entertainment should be passively engaged just because a few people would rather play games than face the grim facts of their deteriorating relationship (or whatever other problem they're ignoring).
And, really, sports have caused the destruction of more relationships and caused significantly more real-world violence than video games have. So, why are you talking so negatively about MMOs and the like but not sports? Perhaps because the typical MMO player is a lot less willing to break your face than the aggressive football fanatic? ;)
Caveats: I am not a researcher or psychologist. I am an MMO developer.
The major problem I have with the "addictive" label is that it makes a value judgment. There are few things that are "addictive" that are considered good things; the big exception is computer gaming, where the word is often used with a positive connotation. An "addicting" game is awesome! A better word would be "compelling", which has less judgment associated with it.
The research observed that while people were playing, they identified the relationships with other players in-game as meaningful, but when they stopped playing, they ceased to describe it as such. To me, that is a lot like a heavy drinker's "bar friendships" - when they stop drinking, those friendships mean a lot less.
One issue to consider is that some people who "get addicted" and lose themselves into a game, particularly an MMO with social connections, have very serious problems with the rest of their life. Often, these people have a case of depression. The interaction with other people online can provide a lot of benefits that help counteract the problem the person is experiencing. For example, if you feel worthless at work because you've been passed over for promotion after promotion, then you probably really like the feeling of being a needed and appreciated member of the party/raid in a game.
If the external condition changes, that can cause a re-evaluation of your situation. If the person above is recognized as a capable worker and gets a promotion in their job, he or she may not seek validation through the game anymore. So, the online relationships may become less important to the individual because they don't need it anymore. I don't see this as any different than forming a new circle of friends when your life circumstances change. The promoted person in our example may start making new friends and have less time for old friends that he or she doesn't come into contact as often. This is seen as fairly natural when we don't include the scary "online" or "gaming" aspect.
Also consider that the person who plays MMOs to the point where their relationship falls apart may already have problems with that relationship. They may be getting something from their online play that is lacking in their offline relationship. Yeah, it's better to address issues head-on and try to resolve them, but many people will avoid problems if they can. The game is just a convenient excuse.
The defensiveness by gamers when confronted with this sort of analysis is depressingly predictable, as well.
Well, sure. People do tend to get defensive when someone points a finger and says, "You're doing the bad thing!" Witness all the excuses that come up during a typical copyright discussion on Slashdot.
Most people can play games without it impacting their life. For the people that do become "addicted", how many of them are using gaming (or anything else) to fill a problem in their life? This is less of a problem with gaming a more of a problem with society. But, it's easier to blame the game than to expect people to change. So, for those of us that can game without letting it rule our lives, it gets a bit tiresome to see gaming demonized so easily.