Escapist #223: M is for Massive

In some ways, "massive" is the perfect word to describe online gaming. It communicates a certain heft - a suggestion that our games have not just become larger, but gained shape and substance. As massive gaming models have become more prevalent, the term has only increased in usage, finding its way into a bevy of acronyms each more weighty than the last: MMORPG, MMOFPS, MMORTS, etc. Even in debates on how best to classify these games - do we stick with the oddly truncated "MMO" or the accurate but somehow lopsided "MMOG"? - there is always the assumption that whatever else these games may be, they're certainly massive. It's the one M to rule them all.

Pod People!

Recently I was invited to present at the University of Bedfordshire's Under the Mask 2009, a conference on the relationship between player and character. Circumstances conspired such that I was unable to go in person, but, age of wonders that we live in, I was able to be broken down into pure digital information and transported through the tubes that comprise The Internet at THE SPEED OF LIGHT. * Thus I was able to be virtually present at an actual presentation on virtuality.

With the help of Bryan Piitz from Georgian Bay Video, I produced this video essay, entitled "Pod People and Swappable Selves: On the Buying an Selling of Avatar." It engages such questions as 'how do players achieve authentic experiences in massively-multiplayer spaces?', 'Can virtual bodies be understood as "genuine?"', and, 'My haircut: is it nice?'

Pod People and Swappable Selves: On the Buying and Selling of Avatar from VideoYEAH on Vimeo.

If you'd just rather have the questions spoiled, the answers are "It's complicated", "Sometimes", and "Sure?"

The paper essay can be read here as a .doc file, along with the other papers presented to the conference. There's some fascinating work on show, and it's my pleasure to have been able to contribute to it.


- Rook

* N.B.: I actually have no idea how the internet works.

Geekonomics: A Blog on Bling

With massive-multiplayer games blooming to big business, and bringing in the big bucks, much more media attention has been bent towards understanding the economics of these behemoths.

Alliterative!

This attention only make sense. Once a successful business model has emerged from a volatile market, it's simply bad business not to know how the model works. For example, when I came over to Florida as a young but optimistic Cuban immigrant, and clawed my way to the top of the 1980's cocaine boom, everybody wanted to know how I did it. My secret? Don't get high on your own supply.

First I got the money. Then I got the power. Then I got the weeeeeeemon.

An exceptional amount of work has been devoted to understanding the real-world economics of such systems. Over at GigaOM, Wagner James Au breaks down the top earners in the market. A lot of the data he reports is not what you'd expect, much of it owing to the boom of Korean MMOs, which operate under the principle of Free-to-play-but-I-guess-you-can-pay-for-some-stuff-like-maybe-a-shirt?-why-don't you-go-get-your-mom's-credit-card-and-we'll-figure-it-out gaming. To be fair, it was a really nice shirt.

Fashionably black is the new black.

Things complicate, however, when you begin analyzing the internal economies of these games, and the ways in which virtual economies meet and affect real ones. Lines become blurry, and definitions become softer. Where some MMOs are designed with commerce in mind - Second Life operates through the continuous investiture and circulation of Lindenbucks, And EVE Online is based upon the very premise of a functioning in-game economy - not all MMOs are devoted to such a maintained system. Most operate under a “dealer” principle, which controls how money flows from, and back to the game. Consider the act of “grinding,” where monsters are killed repeatedly. Upon their bodies, gold or valuables are found.

This is pure van Helmont stuff happening here: The valuables didn’t ‘come’ from anywhere, so much as sprung into existence from the aether. This can approximate a rough time-to-money system well enough, but things get squirrely when trade between players in introduced.

Look at the difference: A player pays another player hundreds of gold for a valuable or rare item, and that money stays in circulation, and can be further invested. But if a player purchases an item from a non-player character vendor, that money vanishes - sometimes to the tune of thousands of gold for the most expensive articles.

Enter the goldsink: the various sites introduced to any functional MMO operating in this system, in which hundreds of thousands of virtual moolah vanish every day. In this way can the value of in-game currency be controlled, even manipulated towards inflation and deflation. People’s purses a little too light, and you can introduce new quest lines that provide players with faster ways to accrue goodies than ever before. If there’s too much money clogging down the system, the introduction of a few new vanity items can suck all that troublesome cash out of the system in a matter of weeks.

Pictured above: Troublesome Cash

This needn’t be done to simply manage the economy - it can also be done to maintain a play environment. As a case in point, consider Blizzard’s management of World of Warcraft in the months preceding their second expansion. Knowing that players of their game would have to be given new ways to occupy themselves in the doldrums between their first expansion and the next, a new location was introduced: One that contained, in addition to a new 5-player dungeon “instance” and a new 25-player “raid” dungeon, a plethora of daily quests that provided gobs of easy cash to players - far easier, in fact, than previous environments had allowed.

In addition to these additions, if players spent enough time grinding “reputation” with a factions associated with these new quests, they could invest their hard-earned virtual cash on.. a title. For one thousand gold, a player can be “NAME of the Shattered Sun.”

To be fair, that is pretty impressive-sounding. I wouldn’t even know how to begin to go about shattering suns.

So: To keep real customers from spending their real time elsewhere and thus stop forking over real money, Blizzard introduced a new virtual place where they could spend their virtual time, amassing virtual wealth to currying virtual favour with some virtual people, to the point that one is given the elite privilege of spending all that virtual money on something that has purely aesthetic value to impress other (real) folks in a virtual space.

Compare that to a virtual mount, which at least helps you cover virtual terrain, or virtual gear, which has direct applicability in interfacing with a virtual environment (read here: pwning). One thousand gold gets you a bunch of virtual letters, stapled to your virtual face, approximating Ozymandias-level posturing. “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Not this guy. But, close enough.

This may be the central difference between economies like those found in traditional MMOs and virtual trade experiments like Second Life and EVE. In the case of the former, at the end of the day, any changes applied to the system in place are may not be to facilitate commerce, but to keep people on the teat.


- Rook

Game-space: The Final FUNtier

Fun fact: Our universe is expanding, and has been for Quite Some Time. This limits our ability to perceive it in sum, since the outer regions are literally traveling too fact to allow light to ever reach us. If things continue in this vein, more and more stellar objects will disappear from the sky altogether, as entropy begins to render the universe unfit for life of any sort. Scientists, helpfully, have dubbed this "The Big Freeze", presumably because it sounded that much more terrifying than "The Big Chill."

But don't worry! You'll be long dead before then.

(Hmm. That's sort of heavy stuff for a Thursday, isn't it? I had just wanted to rhetorically consider the idea of breath in a finite space, before segueing into talking about video games. Let's give it a do-over. )

Fun fact: Our universe is awesome, and has been since I got over dinosaurs. Do you think there are aliens because if we went and visited them, we would be the aliens. So how about that. Soon everyone will be having adventures in the cosmos, flying through Saturn's rings and chasing comets and fighting the Borg, and it will be exactly like a video game. And speaking of video games...

(Okay, much better.)

In the design behind many original video games played in the arcade, play time was directly related to a player's skill, multiplied by their wallet. In these cases as a players skill increased, their individual play sessions would proportionately lengthen in relation, rewarding their play with the opportunity to play more. As players got better and better, play time could be prolonged indefinitely.. at least, until the machines themselves gave up.

Enter the Kill Screen, the result of 8-bit limitations on an otherwise endless play time. Using 8-bit memory, values from 0 to 255 can be recorded properly, but anything past that value causes an integer overflow, wherein the value 'spills over', causing all manner of computational hilarity. In arcade classics such as Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, the game comes to a screeching halt at level 256, rewarding you with a scrambled, unplayable screen.

"What the? I must've eaten some bad fruit."

What should be noted about these games is that though technology presents an ostensible limit on play time, the games themselves don't consist of unlimited content, but rather unlimited iterations of the same content. It's ultimately up to the player to decide how many iterations will be played. It's like a paddle ball or a yoyo: You get your fill, you move on with your life.

On the other hand we have games that present linear play narratives, in which the goal, expressly, is to get from point A to point B. This goal can be as simple as "save the princess", but it's enough to shift the onus from playing to survive to playing to complete. In these content-based "games with endings", play experience begins to resemble something closer to media such as film and literature, involving movement through a concrete work that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. (Or just a beginning and an end, if you used a warp pipe.)

But while these self-contained games can be played through and revisited up to a point of mastery, they are ultimately contained experiences. However, we've reached a point in which many game environments represent neither the iterable arcade experiences of the medium's inception, or the closed-model design inherent to earlier games. Largely, what has changed is how we approach and produce content.

First there is user-generated content, ranging from using internal tools or outright modding. Consider the history of Team Fortress, which originated as a mod of first-person shooter Quake and has now produced a sequel that can be a considered a game in its own right. And then there is Warcraft 3's Defense of the Ancients, a custom map strategy scenario which has become much more popular than the 'actual' game itself. Then there are games that deliberately capitalize on the groupthink of user-generated environments, such as Spore and Little Big Planet: Rather than simply open themselves up to community creativity, these games are designed to rely upon it.

Thank-you, game community, for this umpteenth penis man.

But even in these cases, while user input changes a game's permutations and dimensions, what is occurring is not so much growth, outright, as change. In some cases, games may be changed enough to represent separate iterations entirely, removed from earlier incarnations. The same can't be said for MMOs such as World of Warcraft, where through the process of frequent patches and expansions, changes to game design, and to content, occur right beneath a player's feet.

Entire continents may be plunked down, level caps lifted, entire new tiers of content coming to rest upon a strata of well-worn environment. In the case of Warcraft especially, where this continuous accretion has earned it a gaming-base in the millions, the two play drives - that is, the narrative navigation of linear games and the repetitive compulsion of open-style arcade games - balance each other like a delicate yin and yang.

A game like World of Warcraft cannot be 'mastered' in any meaningful way - the possibility of change, or further iterations, means the best a gamer can hope for is an understanding of its present state. In an environment where a game-world may expand faster than it is played, there exists a limit to one's experiences: An observable universe within a context of future, hypothetical incarnations.

In sum: We have killed the Kill Screen.

But no problem, right? We can always walk away. I mean, it's not like we'll just continue to whir in place like hamsters in a treadmill, until we finally game ourselves to death. Right?

(Hmm. There I go again, being a downer. I've got to end this on a more upbeat note. Think.. think..)



GUYS IT IS DINOSAURS AND IT IS IN SPACE.

(Mission accomplished.)


- Rook