Where Rage and Zen Coexist

Rita, aka Karaya, in a comment on my last post:

I definitely agree with your assessment that I work in that rage-to-master realm. Though I think there are two sides to that coin, and you and I each represent a side. This is really just an amusing brain-tangent; obviously the world isn't so categorical as this mental construct:

When I used to play Soul Calibur games all night with my friends, two of us were clearly the best players: Foley and me. For those who don't know, Soul Calibur is a console fighting game series, like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat (Though far superior to either, imo). I was unequivocally regarded as the best player in the group - the one to beat. But once I got into my groove, Foley still had a chance of beating me in any given fight. He was the only one. And everyone else pretty much dreaded having to play either one of us.

There's a huge psychological component to SC when you know your opponent as well as my friends know each other. You really get insight into the way that person thinks in a high-pressure, fast-paced contest over the course of milliseconds. You develop an instinct for anticipating her/his next move. Not to mention, we played so much of that game that our respective characters became extensions of our own limbs, really. So it was all about the mental game.

Now, as the night went on and we played battle after battle against each other, we'd get warmed up and start thinking and reacting faster. And faster still, to keep up with each other.

At our peaks - in our grooves, if you will - we each had a distinct method of mental processing.

Foley's method we called "Synapses", following a battle during which he commented that his "synapses [had] to fire faster to keep up!" His processing during our battles would take place consciously. He had to focus on my movements and keep his knowledge of my idiosyncrasies in mind, and make constant active decisions to counter my actions.

My method we called "Zen". Once I got in my groove, my processing mostly seemed to take place subconsciously. In fact, at times I had to be careful not to actually focus on anything, as I'd risk "thinking too much". I would tend to stare *through* the screen and watch both our characters in my peripheral vision. I would act and react instinctively.

Somehow I see a bit of a parallel when I compare you and me in the role of MMO enchanter. And I think it's most visible in DDO, illustrated by our choices of Wizard and Sorcerer, respectively.

You tend to study the situation at hand and try to consciously choose your tools and strategies to match it. When you fail, your reaction tends to be "I brought the wrong tools" or "I had the wrong plan", and you adjust accordingly.

I go into a situation with the same set of tools every time and no real plan. Because my tools (spells) are always the same, they're practically extensions of my body. I don't do much planning 'cause I hold myself to the standard that my skill should be sharp enough to handle any situation on the fly. When I fail, my reaction is "This is a worthy foe" or "My skill is lacking and must be honed further".

So in our approach to the spider cave, I see you focusing on the spawn cycles, the wandering patterns, the placement of mobs in that particular situation. Then you consider your tools and draw up an over-arching strategy (subject to adjustment, of course).

I, on the other hand, focus on my reaction time, my awareness, my instinctive understanding of myself and the fundamental mechanics of the game. In my mind, if those items are sharp enough, I will be victorious.

Now regardless of where each of us *focuses*, obviously there is overlap in our experiences. And both of us failed many times and then eventually succeeded. It's just interesting to consider the contrast of styles between the two high elf enchanters of Glory ;)

The difference she describes is real. I've played Soulcalibur a bit. Mostly I played Xiang Wa. I would never try to beat anyone with speed and reaction time, but rather with "timing" or what is called "meiei" in many martial arts. I would look for "gaps" or opportunities and hit them.

This involves some cognition. But it needs to go down into the "fast path" of the brain to execute. So I wouldn't make too much of the differences, we're more the same than different.

The graphic at the top is the Zen Mistress' keyboard layout for DDO, which she shared with me a little while ago, as described for her cleric. It is wildly remapped from the "out of the box" layout. I adapted this for my DDO characters, and it's starting to work, though it's a strange position to have my hands in relative to the keyboard.

I Came Here To Be Podkilled: Vanguard Spider Cave Edition

I learned a new phrase recently, "rage to master". I have a feeling that at least some of you have a gut-level understanding of what that is, but I'm going to tell you anyway, and relate it to my current gaming, so there! (He says with a toss of his fabulous red hair!)



I've been playing Vanguard again. Karaya suggested it, she said she had run out of things to explore in DDO, so while keeping our regular group time, she was going to go explore the vast world, and challenging gameplay of Vanguard - properly this time.

As it turned out, I had played Vanguard for a while, and was entranced by some parts of the game - the diplomacy system, for example, and the crafting system. The combat gameplay featured classes that by and large followed the Everquest archetypes, with a couple of added twists. And I absolutely hated the models they used for high elves. My face, in Vanguard was positively skeletal.

They replaced those models with something a little more healthy looking, fortunately. So I re-upped and started poking around. Some of the best gear is dropped by quests offered by a group known as the URT - United Races of Thestra. (Thestra being my home continent.) I'm starting to get an impression of URT as a bunch of incompetent nincompoops who keep asking me to do horrific things to cover for their mistakes, but never mind.

One quest in particular, given out at Shoreline Ruins, has us investigating the disappearance of a roughly 10 year old girl while her family was at the medieval equivalent of a beach home. The clues finally lead us to a cave facing the northern ocean. The girl is in a cocoon at the back of the cave. The cave is infested with spiders.

These spiders see through invisibility. So no dice there. I had to fight my way through it. Now, I am a psionicist, which is Vanguards version of an enchanter. So I die very quickly when things go wrong.

I spent probably 10-12 hours last Saturday trying to finish this quest. It would go like this: I approach the cave, buffed. I pull something and start my root-and-rot sequence. Something would wander by and add and I would die. Or, maybe I'd make it a ways into the cave first. And something would respawn on me and I'd die. Or mobs that were around a corner would come when I pulled and I'd die. At first I wasn't using a charmed pet, but after a while I did. Which added the charming new failure mode of "Charm starts to break just as you pulled". Along with the failure mode of "Charm starts to break immediately on recharm and since it was in the middle of a fight, you die."

Every possible wrinkle or complication that can make this difficult was used. The level designer of this cave used every trick that he or she could muster. Hidden mobs, wanderers, fast respawn, and a few mobs that are tougher than the rest and respawn randomly. Psionicists have a snare, and so can kite, but it's not really possible in a restricted space, such as that cave. By the time you've killed your way to the back, the mobs in the front have respawned.

My youngest child, taking a break from playing Skyrim, wandered past and watched me playing for a bit. "Why do you play this game?" she exclaimed, somewhat bemused by the uncharacteristically foul language gracing my lips. It was hard to explain.

All I could manage was a vehement, "I can do this!"

There were lots of little internal metrics that told me that I was getting better at it, and that's something I enjoy. For example, the number of kills I could do between deaths was getting bigger. I revised my damage sequence and the mobs were dropping faster. Sometimes now, I could throw up my fast root when things had gone bad and run away and survive. My experience bar was moving forward even though it was three steps forward, and two steps back when I died.

And I was learning every spawn point, every hidden mob and every aggro range in that cave. I knew what to do in each situation.

At about midnight, I reached the back of the cave, freed the girl and started to fight my way out. This has an extra dangerous aspect to it. Respawn is roughly timed to take place after death. Since I'd killed the mobs from the front of the cave to the back, they would respawn in that order. Which means that when I first hit the edge of the respawned mobs on the way out, I would be standing in the spot where the next respawn would take place - at any time now.

My first attempt failed. So did my second. Part way out, lose it, lose the girl. I had to go all the way back to the back of the cave to get out. My second attempt failed as well. As it turns out, Psionicists have an evac ability. So I started to wonder, "Will the girl come with me when I evac?" If it didn't work, she'd be stuck in the cave and I'd have to fight my way in again.

I decided to chance it. It worked. I took her back to the quest-giver, logged out and collapsed into my bed, happy as a clam. (Ok, I chatted with Phritz a bit first, getting him started on the diplomacy system, for which the tutorial is more than a bit lacking.)



I was describing my Saturday to a friend and she said, "Rage to Master". I blinked. She said that the phrase was coined by someone who studies gifted children. Apparently that someone is Ellen Winner

I found a quote from the book on this wikipedia page (it seems a bit dodgy, but the quote seems good enough).

Gifted children have three telltale characteristics, Winner says. First, they begin to master an area of knowledge, or domain, such as math, drawing or chess, at an extremely early age, before starting school. Second, they need little help from adults in that domain, solving problems in often-novel ways, with each discovery fueling the next step. And third, they have what she describes as a rage to master their domain, working at it intensively and obsessively, often isolating themselves from others in order to pursue it. These children push themselves, achieve "flow states" in their work, and beg their parents for the books, musical instruments or art supplies they need to feed their passion. They need stimulating environments to develop their talents, Winner says of these children, but the demand comes from them, not the parents."

Winner may be describing the extreme cases, but I've seen this phenomenon play out a lot in significantly less rarified air. I often feel cheated if I am with a group that has a known, set strategy for a dungeon or an instance and just want to grind through it quickly.

All the deaths I had meant little to me. They were data points, not judgements. My blood was up, and so there were exclamations and expletives, but the deaths were quickly forgotten. Getting to a flow state includes a lot of failure. And that flow state is like a drug, really.

I don't really think this fits into the Bartle personality type of Achiever, by the way. I am not highly motivated by extrinsic rewards such as in-game "achievements". Leveling is good, but not the point. Standing in one place grinding away for hours with basically no variation and no risk isn't terribly interesting. I'm not a bot, don't make me play like one.

I'm pretty sure Karaya is like this, too. That's probably how she got good enough at videogames that her parents say, "She made a deal with the devil" There was no mention of any crossroads, though. I mentioned the spider cave to her and she said, "stupid spiders".

Phritz also has his moments. When we take the Bartle test, we all come out as some degree of Explorer/Socializer. And right now, we're exploring Vanguard. Normal people think we're kind of crazy, but if you're someone who reads this and thinks, "Yeah, right on!" drop me a line in-game.

Bartle Test Results, no Jaymes Sighted.

This is from the fun quiz up at gamerdna.com. Click on the image to take it yourself [Actually, follow the link in the update, it's better, -toldain], and report the results in comments.



Personally, I think it overestimated my explorer score at the expense of my achiever score, but probably not by a whole lot. I tend to stick with games longer than my explorer friends.

As a secondary influence, it describes me as an Explorer Socializer:

Explorer Socializers are the glue of the online world. Not only do they like to delve in to find all the cool stuff, but they also enjoy sharing that knowledge with others. Explorer socializers power the wikis, maps, forums and theory craft sites of the gamer world.

Huh, it's almost like they're describing someone who writes posts about the math and psychology involved in games. Do you know anyone like that?

Thank you for your support.

UPDATE: Here is a much better link for taking the quiz. You'll have to register to get your results.

Mass Effect 2: When the World Doesn't See Your Gender

Slowly catching up to the MMO world, Mass Effect 2 allows players to customize their avatar - Shepard - with a variety of looks and either gender. Here's a YouTube video paying tribute to FemShepard:



Lesley of Twowholecakes.com writes about what it's like to play Mass Effect 2 with an avatar that's a lesbian woman of color.

When Brown Lady Shepard is rude, or curt, or dismissive, the reactions she receives from others are not to her gender or her race, but to her words. Why? Because the character was written with the expectation that most people will play it as a white dude, a character for whom reactions based on gender or race are inconceivable. He’s “normal”, y’see. In real life, and in most media representation, we are culturally conditioned to respond differently to a big ol’ white dude with no manners than we do a woman of color doing the exact same thing. The white dude is just a jerk, but there’s often a built-in extra rage factor against the woman of color, for daring to be “uppity”, for failing to know her place. This distinction is often unconscious and unrecognized, but it’s there. In Mass Effect, no matter what my Shepard says or does, not only is the dialogue the same as it would be for the cultural “default”, but the reaction from the other non-player characters is the same. (The only exception to this is the handful of times that Lady Shepard is called a “bitch” — I suppose Dude Shepard may get called a bitch too, but I doubt it. I find it fascinating that they would record specific name-calling dialogue in this way.) Brown Lady Shepard waves her intimidation up in a dude’s face and he backs the fuck down, just like he would if she were a hyper-privileged white guy. My Lady Shepard faces no additional pressure to prove herself because of her background; if she is dismissed, it’s on the basis of her assertions, and not because she’s a queer woman of color from a poor socioeconomic background — even though that’s exactly what she is.

There's a joy here that I find very appealing. This is the joy of liberation. I would take nothing away from this, but I have one thing to add: the "big ol'" part of "big ol' white dude" matters.

I'm a white dude who is decidedly not "big ol'". I still enjoy male privilege, but people feel a lot more free to let me know they don't like what I'm doing than they would someone a foot taller than me. Of which there are quite a few in the world. I would like to, you know, feel that I exist.

Tall guys make more money and have more sex. You can manipulate how aggressive people are in the ultimatum game just by altering the size of their avatar in a virtual reality. You can put numbers on it.

Actually, it's even more subtle. Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailensen manipulated a virtual reality so that subjects thought themselves to be taller than their counterpart, even though their counterpart in the ulitmatum game percieved them as the same height as themselves. Under these conditions, the subjectively taller person would make more agressive splits, and reject unfair splits more frequently as well - just because they perceived themselves to be taller.

Yee and Bailensen make no report on the effects that having fabulous red hair might have, however.

Biology isn't destiny. Napoleon and Jet Li come to mind. As a martial artist, I have physically dominated men who were much larger than myself. It was in training, but still, some of these men had a serious mental block about whether I could do this, even as I was doing it. This experience is not that dissimilar to the experience of some women martial artists I know.

Anyway, I don't play many console games these days. But I'm really getting tempted by Mass Effect 2.

Why Instances are Better?

Dan Ariely talks about an experiment that addresses questions of human meaning and purpose. I got about two thirds of the way through this when I realized that this is quite relevant to MMO's, and suggest that instances will keep people coming back a lot longer.

If you kill the boss and watch him respawn before your eyes, it kills your sense of accomplishment much faster.

Circles and Arrows and a Photograph on the Back of Each One

One of the first things I noticed when I first started playing EQ2 was how behavioral it was. There was a pleasing tone, and a gfx display when you leveled. There was another sound every time one of your skills improved. There was audio cues, reward and punishment, for countering an event while crafting, and another sound for completing a quality tier during a crafting encounter. The electrons staged a celebration on your computer whenever you actually completed a recipe.

All of this seemed great. And it extended to quests, too. Completing quests got you rewards, experience and loot and praise.

So what did I do in response to all this? Basically, I trained myself to ignore it. I couldn't have told you why back then, but it seemed too much like I was being manipulated, being pulled toward a game-playing behavior that I didn't like. We know that now as The Grind. I leveled more slowly than many people, and did horrible grindy book quests, and tried to solo as an Illusionist back when that was hard and our DPS sucked. I avoided trying to maximize my DPS, preferring to try to maximize my ability to control an encounter. Unfortunately, this put me at odds with most of the rest of the players and the game designers as well. Eventually I gave in and respecced to high DPS. In EQ2.

Tipa posts today on "How I Killed MMO's (Can FFXIV give them a rez?)"

I don’t want to wait. I want to skip the boring parts and get right to the fun parts. Boring time is time I could spend doing something else. I don’t even bother pretending, when I start a new MMO, that I’m there for the long haul. Wizard101 has been the exception, here. I sub to WoW for a couple months every year or so, plan and enjoy some F2P RPGs until something else comes up, but — I’m going to be playing any given game only a few weeks, I’m never even going to see whatever end game you have cooked up. The first time the game gets boring for me, I’m gone.

There's some discussion of quest-text skipping, too. Tipa mentioned wanting to to skip through the cinematic story parts of the latest Rock Band edition at Best Buy. Because that's not relevant to getting the reward. But the part that made my day was this:

This is pretty consistent with research on intrinsic motivation. Children who are rewarded for drawing pictures tend to not draw pictures except when they are rewarded, and generally lose interest after a while. The link earlier in this paragraph is to an article with the subtitle "Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain."

When I think of my career, I realize that I did as much as I possibly could to keep my intrinsic interest, and my creativity, alive. I need to get paid for working, it's true, and I wanted to be paid fairly. These things got discussed twice a year, at salary time. The rest of the time, I mostly ignored my pay when it came my work. I worked on things that advanced corporate goals, to be sure, but those goals were also in accord with my own personal goals and interests.

But this isn't always the case with games. I've been the grinder, at one time grinding out writs in Lavastorm to level the guild and to gain faction with the Concordium. I've skipped quest text myself.

The game makers seem to be catching on to this. EVE is famous for how sandboxy it is, and how little direction it gives its players. My current frustration with EVE is that it isn't quite sandboxy enough. I'd like to be able to produce new in-game items, such as an item named "A Lock of Toldain's Fabulous Red Hair", and hand it out as a gag. I'd like to be the only person in the game who could produce an authentic version of it, too. But I'm fine with someone else being able to produce a good counterfeit of it. That could produce fun, in the hands of people who want to play.

There are some serious technical issues with this: If every player did this, It would create massive problems in their databases. But I'm impressed with stories like this, where a very good time is had by all using only dice, blocks, graph paper, a few reference books, and a heaping helping of imagination.

It has been argued that the all-too-literal 3D gfx realizations of modern gaming leave too little to the imagination. But it doesn't have to be so. There are definitely games that think of themselves as canvas and palette.

As far as FFXIV goes, Tipa writes that it seems to lead one around by the nose a lot less. There seems to be a story in there, but you are going to have to go out and find it. I don't think this is quite the "canvas and palette" idea.

As regards DDO, which is what I'm mostly playing these days, there are some leanings. Yes, the game is entirely structured around quests and instances. However, the problems posed in these quests are somewhat open ended. You can go through the instances in "Hulk Smash!" mode. Or you can be more of a manipulator, such as Karaya "You're on my team NOW" Nydusi. (Ok, ok, I know you spelled your name that way in some game or another.) There isn't just one way to deal with any trap either. They can be jumped over, disarmed, tumbled through, resisted, or just plain tanked. In most cases. Each one is different. But there isn't one way to solve it. Sometimes Feather Fall is just what you need to deal with some situation or get the treasure. It's not that I care that much about getting the treasure, but it's that figuring out how to do it is fun.

Or another case in point: Soloing a wizard in DDO. The fundamental problem is that not only do you have few hit points and bad AC, you don't even have enough spell points to kill every mob in the instance. (This is in contrast to sorcerors, who probably do have enough spell points.) So, you are going to have to do something more creative. I've found one style that works pretty well, but there are probably more.

Have I ever given up and looked at the answer on the internet? Not once. As Tipa says:

I could go the web and find the next step already written out for me, with guides and arrows and hints and suggestions and 8×10 glossy pictures with a paragraph on the back explaining each one in great detail with times and dates and ….

Ahem. I think you mean "8x10 color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one"

(What can I say? I am that guy. I am the original "that guy". This sort of thing is bound to happen when you are 3000 years old.)

But it's a good point. There's one dungeon, early on, that I still don't quite understand all of how it works: What's that lever for? But maybe I will figure it out one day. And that will feel really good. And I'll be happy for them, but irritated that they got it first.

May you all have a Thanksgiving dinner that can't be beat.

Medal of No Shame At All

Ta-Nehisi Coates is my favorite non-gaming blogger. Reading him, and commenting in his comment section challenges me to think harder and to see farther. And he's been known to play, and to write about video games and MMO's from time to time.

Today, the topic is Medal of Honor, which allows you to play a Taliban character during multiplayer mode. Politicians from Britain, New Zealand and Canada are unhappy about this.

Seth Seisal writes, in the NY Times, thinks this is due to a misunderstanding of the game:

If Medal of Honor let you play as the Taliban throughout an entire single-player campaign, then we would have a real controversy on our hands. Imagine the reaction to a game that included a mission where you were cooperating with Al Qaeda during the siege of Tora Bora and had to protect Osama bin Laden while spiriting him to safety.

That is not what is going on here.

I think it's probably accurate that the politicians in question aren't very familiar with videogames. And this doesn't seem all that different from steam-tunnel "D&D killed my baby" madness.

I'll take it as given that all my readers are familiar with video games, and multiplayer features of them. I've played many Bond villians during Goldeneye multiplay. However, as usual, TNC takes it a step farther:

[I]t must be said that the stories I love generally have a villain I can relate to, someone who I can almost ... see myself in. ...

As a maniacal "kill them all" villain, Magneto is, to my mind, just another foil. As a dude with a quasi-defensible, if ultimately amoral, perspective on mutants, he grabs me a little. When contemplating evil, I want to see some of myself. I need to feel the lure of evil, it's seduction. The devil must be luscious to grab me.

[...]

My sense is that video games will have to confront this, at some point. They probably already are. A video game told from the perspective of a Taliban insurgent isn't likely any time soon. Which is too bad. I think that's exactly the kind of video game that might help us get to some emotional truths about the past ten years.

And here we are again, at the videogames as art place.

First of all, I think videogames are doing this already. Not the Taliban specifically, mind you. But consider the story arc for Arthas in the Warcraft series. The fallen paladin is a familiar story to us, Darth Vader, anyone?

Then there's the quest line for Death Knights in World of Warcraft. That went to a very dark place, and people maybe didn't understand, but they felt it. Lest you think that only Blizzard does this, the quest lines in Ruins of Kunark had a great deal of moral ambivalence. You would tell one faction, "Ok, I'll go kill your enemies" and do so. Then you would go to the enemies, and offer to kill the people you were just helping. More than a few people felt dirty doing that, to which my response is: Good!

Still in the fantasy setting, DDO has some quests that have left me shaking my head. For one, The Silver Flame wants you to go to a place where there is gambling, smash the gambling tables and kill the guards. The games content people know what they are doing, since the loading screen for that instance has the message, "The Silver Flame is not afraid to enforce it's moral judgements by the sword." In other quests you are asked to steal and collect taxes.

I've actually begun to skip a few of these, for the sake of roleplay. That is, given the character I've created, and their situation, would they actually take this job if offered? I was talking last night with Boaz, an Eve corpmate (and reader! I have readers!!) who also plays DDO. Their group has mostly let go of the "must level faster" grind, and looks to just do something that's fun and interesting. Part of that fun is imagining what things your character would do, and what things they wouldn't.

My alt in DDO is Martyy, currently Figher 1/Rogue 1. Marty wears half-plate, but can bluff and sneak attack (and improved trip). As is typical for me, he started in another system in another (tabletop) campaign. So I have a good idea of his character. He's happy to be mob muscle, or muscle for the powers that be. But as he was smashing the gambling tables, he was thinking, "I'd rather be playing these tables, than smashing them. This job sucks!"

In Eve Online, players routinely commit acts of piracy, terrorism, and extortion. The game itself provides no moral compass. So, one of the joys I have is charting my own moral territory. Some of the missions in Eve have a decidedly dark side. In one series of five missions, you spend most of your time running around playing nanny for a rich heiress. Bringing her cash from Daddy, bailing her out of jail, etc. But then, in the final mission you find out that Daddy wants you to kill her, because he thinks her unworthy of his money. Outright, cold-blooded murder. As Milgram would have predicted, most people do so, with the thought, "It's just a game".

Let me be clear. It is a game. I'm very glad that there are pirates and miscreants in the game, as well as war opponents. I'm even kind of glad that there are scammers in the game. What I'm looking for is for someone to actually own their own black hat, to have the thought, yeah, I'm a bad guy, and here's why... Goonswarm, our allies and landlords, and notorious Eve bad guys, seem to really get this.

Because, you see, it's very easy to become a bad guy while still thinking that you are a good guy. That's how it works. Adolph Hitler was convinced that he was only doing what was needed to save the German people and the country he loved. German soldiers considered themselves honorable patriots, as Seth writes:

That thought has found expression in games for many decades. The Avalon Hill classic PanzerBlitz helped reshape the board game business when it was introduced in 1970 as an evenhanded simulation of the Eastern Front. When, as a child, I played as a German commander in that game or as a Japanese World War II admiral in the war game Flat Top, should my parents and teachers have been concerned that I was turning into a fascist?

In any case, my path, at least in Eve and DDO is to pick and choose my course, my quests, my missions, my code of honor. Not as I would choose, but as the character I'm playing would choose. Because it's more fun that way, and more interesting.

After all, it's just a game.

Hello, My Name Is...

I think Wilhelm2451 is on to something. He's been writing about the RealID thing going on with World of Warcraft. In a nutshell, soon you will be required to log in to the WoW official forums with RealID, e.g., your real name.

There are lots of issues with this, that TAGN has posted about before, along with many others in the WoW community.

But now, Wil has found a press release describing how Starcraft II will be tied in with Facebook. Facebook, you see, requires that you use your real name as part of its terms of service. He figures that, while there is as yet no press release for the equivalent for World of Warcraft, it's only time. I think he's right.

This seemed to me to be a good opportunity to explain why I am anonymous. One main reason is much the same as his: I don't really want prospective clients or business associates to know that I game, and that I have as an alter-ego a redheaded, 3 million year old high elf. There are also some things about my personal life that I'm not particularly eager to share with just anybody that happens to run into one of the many faces of Toldain. It would be a distraction, at best, and a security risk at worst.

I'm not a big fan of Facebook either. There are many reasons for this. First, Facebook carries out a level of social engineering that offends me. I've had friends send me cute little things, and when I try to respond in kind, Facebook demands my cell phone number, or payment of some other kind. That's where it ended for me. They are using the Law of Reciprocity to get me to disclose information of value to them, a third party. This is like the telemarketers who talk to you like they are your best friend. They aren't, and I won't.

There's another thing about Facebook: context collapse. I have friended many people from my high school days. You know, 2.5 million years ago. Lots of the stuff I'd like to talk/write about wasn't interesting to them then, and probably wouldn't be now. I don't really want to play the chatty geek to an audience that doesn't care.

Furthermore, I'm sure that there's a few of them that consider Dungeons and Dragons demon-worship. Last week, I was at a family reunion in Montana, visiting a cousin that is very dear to me. She is a Mormon, and there are some topics that are just better avoided, though, and she and I do that for the sake of our familial connection. I can't do that on Facebook.

As I write this, I have become aware that this is the "closet". It is parallel to the experience of someone who is gay, or transgendered, but probably with a lot less at stake. Nobody has been beaten or killed for playing D&D, as far as I know. So I have to entertain the possibility that maybe I should come out of that closet. After all, geeks rule the world now. On the other hand, nobody really wants to be forced out the closet by other people.

One of the claims for RealID is that it will tone down the trolling and abusive posting in the official forums. I think it will probably tone things down some, anonymity has some effects. Jamie Madigan is eager to measure the effect, and there is likely to be some effect here.

EQ2 solved this by simply deleting posts and banning posters. Thus EQ2flames was born. Interestingly though, you must register and post in EQ2flames as an in-game character, and any accusations or humiliating stories must name names, and must be posted as the character who witnessed them. Swearing is allowed.

Is that anonymity, or not? Toldain is a persistent, transportable identity. I have a reputation that I care about. I have things that I stand for. There are things I won't post or write about or say as Toldain. Some of it is a constructed persona, but that persona is constructed from me.

I think we need to stop thinking about anonymity as a binary. While there are things that I feel freer to write about as Toldain, there are other things I avoid writing/talking about in that persona. I think of it as a channel, and I try to keep communication on that channel focused.

In any case, the EQ2 forums have long since ceased to be of interest to me. They are far too bland. So, should they try something like this, it will be disappointing, but have little impact on me. Should it develop that my online identity would be forced into the public via Facebook or something else, I would probably quit playing Everquest 2. And no, you can't have my stuff.

Does Killing 10 Rats Make You Smarter?

Probably not. But there are other computer games out there which are specifically designed to make you smarter. However, a recent study throws a big lagspike at the claims of these games.

They compared spending half an hour playing some of the games with spending a half an hour surfing the internet and found no difference. Of course, the game manufacturers have their own studies that show that it does help. And at least on manufacturer's games seem to help a little bit, according to a third party neuroscientist.

I learned a lot of geography and history from board games and wargames over the years, though the popular titles now don't have so much of this content. But in terms of raw IQ, general intelligence, I think I have to agree. There's no doubt that we get better at playing a game, but that doesn't seem to translate from the game to the world. Or even to another game. Or else I'd have billions if ISK by now, instead of feeling like the perpetual noob in EVE that I do.

I really got a chuckle from this quote:

Other experts said brain games might be useful, but only if they weren't fun.

"If you set the level for these games to a very high level where you don't get the answers very often and it really annoys you, then it may be useful," said Philip Adey, an emeritus professor of psychology and neuroscience at King's College in London.

So I guess that leaves World of Warcraft right out then.

EQ2 Used for Economic Research

I just ran across this piece describing economic research that Dmitri Williams and Edward Castronova are carrying out using datasets from EQ2 provided to them by Sony.

Don't worry, it's all anonymous. Williams refers to virtual worlds as the equivalent of rat mazes and petri dishes. The main advantage of a virtual world is clean data. Everything is there, to the last transaction, and on a fairly large scale. It can be argued that are many artificialities in a virtual economy, such as EVE or EQ2. That's why they make the analogy to a petri dish. There's lots of economic behavior going on, and it can be tracked with complete accuracy.

Williams and Castronova's article opens with a fascinating quote:

In The Treachery of Images (1928–9), René Magritte painted a picture of a pipe above the words: ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ (‘This is not a pipe’). In virtual worlds, there are no pipes either, yet users manage to use virtual objects and characters in a vast array of social transactions. When observers see a virtual sword on the computer screen, the paraphrase of Magritte’s admonition – ‘Ceci n’est pas une épée’ (‘This is not a sword’) – surely comes to mind. However, is the sword only an image? Or does it become invested with some kind of socially constructed realness as a result of playing a role in human communication and exchange?

Which really reminds me of the phrase you hear in MMO's a lot: "It's just a game." They go on to describe their plan:

By examining transactions from a large commercial virtual world with hundreds of thousands of players, the current mapping test concerns whether the items and economic behaviors within a virtual world function in the same way that they would in the real world – where, it is noted, currency is also largely representational (a dollar is only a piece of paper, but is assumed to have a value in gold backed by the US treasury). Do the same behaviors that make a US dollar bill economically ‘real’ also make a virtual sword economically ‘real’? Does economic behavior map from the real world into the virtual?

What may have started out as unreal, through our time and effort becomes real to us. Now the associations and emotions we have around it may well have a different slant: We are likely to be less risk averse, for instance. There's a less scholarly discussion of this on the EVE forums, addressing the question, "Is it just a game?"

One of my favorite quotes from that discussion, which isn't terribly EVE specific, and worth a read:

I used to bring this up to the goons now and then. They'd literally spend hundreds of hours planning and organizing ways to annoy people, and then when some random guy who only plays a couple hours a week complained they'd say "it's just a game".

Props to Sony for providing their data to economic and sociological research.

Looking For Gender

From Raph, I just read (skimmed really) "Looking for Gender (LFG): Gender roles and behaviors among online gamers" which is summarized here.

This research was carried out on EQ2 players, over one weekend. It included a survey, and other data, such as play time and kills. Anything identifying was removed, so don't worry.

They found that, in general, males are more motivated by achievement, and females are more motivated to socialize. This is typical for such studies. However, the difference was smaller than was expected.

Your mileage may vary, of course. Mine does. These days, I only play to catch up with my friends. I'm completely burned out when it comes to crashing more void shard zones for more shards for better armor for the next toon, etc, etc, blah, blah, blah.

So that makes me a social player. At the moment. I've been very achievement oriented at times. How many hours did I spend in Lavastorm crunching through writs so that I could gain faction with The Concordium? Too many. Mostly solo, too.

They also found that there was a smaller group of women who were very hard core. The top 10% of women players played more hours than the top 10% men, and made more kills per hour. They were highly achievement oriented. Fascinating, Captain.

I find myself wishing that they would look at play experience, and cross-correlate with gender. I've seen many women who started playing because their husband/boyfriend/whatever did, as a way to socialize. But as they continued playing, and gained experience, they seem to become more engaged in the play of the game itself. Which is not to say they all became grinders, but they do tend to become more confident and assertive. Of a brief list of women I know who play, only a small minority played a class other than a healer first.

But after they play a while, things seem to change. They will log on even when their partner hasn't/can't. They will play dps classes. Some even try out tanking classes, which I posit are the most "masculine", at least in EQ2.

One other finding that intrigued me was this: Bisexual females are highly overrepresented in EQ2, though not so bisexual males. I don't know what that means, and skimming the paper didn't help.

They don't report for transgendered males/females. I would think that MMO's are a godsend to such individuals, actually, and would expect them to be strongly overrepresented in MMO populations. Has anybody studied this?

View from the Sewer

Catchy title, isn't it? Wilhelm, of The Ancient Gaming Noob has a post up pondering the social aspects of MMO's. He quotes a commenter (quoting Tom Lehrer):

Life is like a sewer, what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.

Wilhelm then asks, "How about you? How significant do you see the social aspects of MMOs in your view?"

I'm like Wilhelm. I don't seek out new friend constantly. I don't do PUGs a lot. I've documented some of my worst PUG experiences. And yet...

I have many friends online, particularly in EQ2, who I only know through online gaming. They are as solid friends of mine as my RL friends, maybe moreso. And I know people I would not have the opportunity to know if it were not for MMO's. For example, the couples I know who are in the military and who have served in Iraq recently. My circle would not intersect with theirs in any way other than via MMO's. But I am enriched by them, and thrilled to be a part of their life, no matter how small.

And there are others. Mostly they are younger than me, which is inevitable, since how many folks are 3000 years old, after all? But it's also good. Again, I wouldn't be around them if not for MMO's.

And my newest passion EVE Online, also follows this pattern. There are a few old friends and more new ones. It's hard to say which friendships will really last, but that's how it works face-to-face, too, isn't it? I certainly have an opportunity to meet new folks, I bet some of them will stick.

I can be amicable and cordial with nearly everyone. But I can't be long-time friends with nearly everyone, the numbers just don't work. I think there was a time in my life when that disappointed me, or made me feel guilty. (I'm aces at that whole guilt game). Not so much now.

Here's the thing. This touches an aspect of MMO gaming that confounds me. In what other entertainment business do you routinely allow or perpetrate unpleasantness on your paying customers? I think there's a few cases, but it's striking, and a fundamental aspect of gaming as entertainment.

Games need to be a challenge or they are boring. But if there's too much frustration and unpleasantness, people also leave. We've seen lots of accomodations for this kind of thing in game designs, with death penalties getting smaller and quests easier to manage, and dungeons becoming exclusive, and camps being eliminated. But the core issue remains. The game needs to be a challenge at some level, or lots of gamers will lose interest.

So it is with the social aspect of the game. There are large numbers of people playing the game, and interacting with each other fairly freely. Not all of those interactions are going to be positive. In many other businesses, the public isn't encouraged to interact all that much with each other, because it's bad for Starbuck's business if someone has a loud argument in front of the counter. But MMO's do it anyway.

I don't find it surprising that the most popular MMO by a huge stretch, WOW, also has some of the worst social behavior, because it's a numbers game. Truly unpleasant people tend to move around a lot, because they aren't able to stay in one place, or one guild, or even in one toon. Which means that far more people get to experience the joy of their behavior. And with more people playing WOW than any other game, there are consequently more truly unpleasant people playing WOW than any other game. And still they make piles of cash.

Meanwhile, the people worth knowing, the ones that make your day, or lighten your life, aren't usually as visible. They do their business and move on. They don't make a big fuss or draw a lot of attention to themselves. They can and do lead, but the best leaders do it almost invisibly.

These kind of people, the friends-for-life that you find once in a while, are worth it. They are worth the petty aggravations of the PUG you got into which turned out to be full of drunken, infighting, slumming power-raiders. They are worth the irritation of having to cope with that guildie who has a talent for irritating everyone else in the guild.

All MMO's have this issue. Last night on Teamspeak, some members of my alliance were discussing a problem child that had been in the alliance recently. This was the sort of person who wants someone else to take their carrier somewhere to get his stuff because they hate him so much there that he can't go there. He was described as controlling, overbearing and demeaning, too. He was given the boot.

And still people play. Playing MMO's has a certain pleasure to it that I also get from reading comment threads on very popular blogs. I feel less insulated somehow, when I read the junk people will post. All the emotion is something like a primal scream that has been turned into music, the music of, say, Nirvana or Pearl Jam, or The Sex Pistols, to be sure, but music nonetheless.

I play MMO's to be engaged with other people. We often dream of having only the good parts of life and editing out the bad parts. And games are meant to be fantasy worlds, right? I can see the equation, and sometimes when I play I just want to be by myself and putter around. But that's a mood, not a choice. The best times are when I get a group, sometimes friends, sometimes new friends, and climb some mountain together. We have done things that were pretty darn cool.

The games we play are social. "Social" does not mean "filled with fairies and unicorns that do my bidding and always tell me how fantastic my fabulous red hair looks." It means "filled with people". And that's a good thing.

Apparently I'm turning into a Will Wright junkie. I just ran across an interview Wright did with biologist E.O. Wilson on NPR.

In it Wright mentions SimAnt, a game he made based on his interest in biology and his reading of Wilson. My first thought was, "Yeah, but how well did it sell?" Much to my surprise, it apparently sold 100,000 copies and was named Best Simulation Program by the Software Publisher's Association. So much for cynicism, and my notions of what is commercial and what isn't. Just to further rub salt in my own wounds, I remind myself that The Sims is the best selling game of all time. And it isn't really even a game by conventional definitions. There are no victory conditions, no phat l00t.

But what about The Sims Online? That didn't seem to work as well, shutting down August 1 of last year, after being rebranded as EA-Land in 2007. I never played it, I don't know what the problems were, though the Wikipedia article hints at problems with the in-game economy. Or maybe it was that whatever was interesting and fun about The Sims was spoiled by having other people around?

Anyway, we were talking about E.O. Wilson's interview. He stated that he thinks that games will be very big in education, and talked about having a virtual Jurassic forest that students could walk through with an instructor, walking away from the "I talk, you listen" format of college lectures. Honestly, I'd say the lecture is the one thing in college courses most likely to survive, though I agree that the printed textbook is in big danger.

It got me thinking though. What's the game that teaches people to do algebra or calculus in that sort of exploratory, toy-like way? Tying this back to MMO's, can any of this be a shared experience?

On the plus side, I've learned a great deal from board games and tabletop roleplaying, which is social. On the minus side, once you bring other people into the equation, you introduce the possibility of shame, which stifles learning.

As I said yesterday, I think that shame has to be addressed not with game mechanics, but socially. In fact, by striving to avoid shaming players, and allowing them to be successful at every step of the way, game designers may unwittingly be feeding the shame culture by creating expectations of success. I think this plays out in education with the whole "self-esteem" curriculum movement. I've come to see confronting failure as a critical part of growth.

Of course, game designers are trying to sell games as pleasant recreations, making players fail all the time might not sell too many copies. But I've continued to be astonished at how strict MMO gamedevs can get away with being to their customers. Games can have powerful effects through narrative and media. Isn't it possible to separate failure and shame? We do that in private all the time...

The Lessons of Bill the Pony

After taking pretty much the whole month of August off from blogging, I make a couple of posts and Shazzam!, people I read and regard highly are dropping interesting comments on them. I'm feeling humble and grateful to find that there are people I respect who read my blog and are interested enough to comment. It als makes me feel, umm, chatty!

Brian "Psychochild" Green had this to say about "Intrinsic Motivation in MMO's":

I think one of the problems here is that for whatever reason, even though people do better in autonomous situations, a lot of people like structure. Many people want to go into a quest hub, grab a bunch of quests, and then follow the instructions (or Questhelper arrows) and then get the reward. They like building a character in the proscribed way.

I think "Psycho" (Cue Bernard Hermann's violins) is exactly right. People don't like sandboxes, they want something fun to do. At a minimum, they want to know what buttons there are to push.

But I think that structure can be successfully separated from extrinsic rewards. Or mostly so. Last night on LOTRO has a case in point. I rescued Bill the Pony. I feel great about that, and not because of the quest item I got. I vendored it anyway and got maybe 10sp for it. Not exactly something that makes leaves fall off off trees.



I found out that Bill was out roaming around and needed help from a quest node. But dang, the reward at that point was irrelevant, I would have paid to rescue Bill. In a way, I did, in fact, pay.

Once you've found Bill, you need to escort him to safety. And he is pretty much a warg magnet. Classic escort quest, Turbine-style. Bill wanders all around taking nothing even remotely resembling a straight line to the target, all the while popping his own tormenters to add to whatever happens to be spawning at the moment.

I was really glad to be a mezzer, but about 50 feet from "safe" it was too much, and I died. But the quest wasn't over. I sat there and watched one of the mobs run off, and another chew on Bill, who seems to be rather indigestible. The third still had the heavy damage I'd put on him before keeling over.

So I hit the "revive" button to revive on the spot, and mezzed the healthy one immediately, and then killed the damaged one with what little mana I revived with. I sat around a bit, waiting for some mana and health to regen. Damage the remaining warg, then mez. Stun, damage, mez. Repeat until dead. Once the combat ends, resummon my pet. Bill walks the last 50 feet to the road and I'm done. Wow, what a great experience.

Part of what made that great was the structure. The quest pointing to Bill, the actual escort quest itself, the popping mobs as part of that quest, and so on. (By the way, we had a great guild discussion afterward about which was the best escort quest in LOTRO.) Part of the fun was me doing something that's off the beaten track. When LOTRO added the ability to revive on the spot (with a cooldown of 2 hours), I doubt they were thinking that anyone would be able to use it in this way. So, I have the extra satisfaction of knowing I pulled something off that is unusual and kind of hard to do.

So, good times.

Was this an exploit? It's hard to see how, I used the feature to do exactly what its supposed to do. Does it ruin the story? Not really, since in LOTRO terms, I didn't die, I just got afeard. This time, I pulled it back together and saved Bill. Other times, I pull it back together only to die, I mean run away, again. And dying still incurs repair costs. So it isn't exactly a strategy.

Ok, can this be packaged in a way that will revitalize MMO's and make millions of dollars, and have people talking about wanting to copy your game instead of WoW? I kind of doubt that. One phrase I use a lot is, "I'm not normal". And I mean it. Stuff I like isn't necessarily mainstream. Game companies have got so good at evoking a Pavlovian response they know which kind of bell goes with which breed of dog. It gets them the big surge of cash, too.

People might start playing because its fun, but they keep playing for other reasons: social connections, social status, and simple force of habit. A good raid loot grind can keep people subscribed for months after they've figured out and beat all the raid encounters. That's money in the bank, under the subscription model, I don't really expect people to walk away from it.

The fundamental issue is this: It takes a game designer a lot longer to come up with interesting and fun things to do than it takes a player to play through it. When you can get a million or so people to all play it, then you're getting a good payback, but any reasonable investment is going to have a years worth of game design played out in about 3-4 months.

A lot of the fun of saving Bill the Pony comes from the fact that I know who Bill is, because of the licensing tie-in. LOTRO game devs didn't have to first explain to me who Bill the Pony is, then let me rescue him.

The other trouble with a very open design is that this is the internet age. Anything that one person is successful with will get imitated 10 million times. We used to call imitation "aping", but I'm convinced it ought to be called "humaning". We do it a lot more than monkeys. So what starts out as a clever strategy becomes a killing tsunami.

But the point is that intrinsic motivation (rescuing Bill!) was far more important than extrinsic (the reward that I couldn't use and wasn't probably any better than what I have). Here's a question to ponder. Was Mario64 more tilted to extrinsic or intrinsic motivation? What you got for finishing levels were stars. And satisfaction. Lots of satisfaction. Jumping stuff, sliding down slides. Fun. I'm thinking it weighted heavily to intrinsic. What do you think?

Intrinsic Motivation in MMO's

I watched this video today, and then I ran across Brian Green's extreme makeover of Legendary Items in LOTRO. As I was commenting on his blog that the only other option for random rare drops seemed to be the grind, I realized something. MMO's have been all about extrinsic motivation, and nothing about intrinsic motivation.

If you don't know what that means, watch the talk, it's a good primer. Or, here's another example: Take a set of first graders and divide them into two groups: for the first group, put out a big box of crayons and paper, and just let them go at it. Coloring is fun, after all. That's called intrinsic motivation.

For the second group, put out a reward system for coloring. More coloring, more reward. This is extrinsic motivation.

Ok, now before you read on, try to guess what happens, both initially and over time.

Answer: There's more coloring for about a week or two with extrinsic motivators, also known as "incentives". Then no coloring at all. None. Zip. Nada. Phooey!

Does this seem familiar? Does it remind you of a certain "shard" system in a favorite MMO? It does me... I haven't been playing much over the summer, and I think I just figured out why. I got really tired of grinding shards for armor for my THIRD toon in a row (my defiler is closing in on 80.) Doing the stuff I do has to be fun in and of itself.

I have been known to grind long and hard for very little reward. I can't tell you how many writs I did in Lavastorm mountains killing goblins, just so I could have the word "Exalted" appear in front of my name tag. That was at 150 faction a pop too. (Kids these days have it way too easy now that writs give a lot more faction points, grumble, grumble. I had to earn it the hard way, in the lava, and it was uphill both ways!)

I came to MMO's from tabletop games, and most of my games were with very stingy DM's. We had scorn for "Monte Haul" campaigns with loads of loot. I don't see it as all that bad these days, but really, focusing on intrinsic goals of the players and the characters were much more important.

As Dan Pink describes, there are three aspects to intrinsic motivation: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. MMO's are pretty good at Autonomy. There's no manager standing over you telling you what to do at every turn. There are lots of NPC's with stuff they want you to do, and a full quest journal, but you can always say, "screw it today", and go rearrange furniture in your house and chat with friends.

Mastery can be used, and it's why I play, and why I play an enchanter class. Button mashing is not what we're about. At least it didn't used to be. Locking down an encounter that might end up as a wipe is still very satisfying, because it's about my skill in targeting, prioritizing, and a sort of juggling. Much is possible.

However, gear and dps seems to dominate. Don't get me wrong, I think there probably is a mastery curve to doing dps. But you can't even play unless you have the right gear. And getting that gear means grinding, or getting lucky. I still don't have a Praetor's Guard, but running that zone stopped being fun quite a while ago.

Ok, what about Purpose. Purpose is kind of tricking in a persistent-world MMO. You can do quests and see cutscenes where the bad guy is vanquished and that's pretty satisfying, but you also know that if you start another toon, and run them through, the bad guy will be there waiting for you again.

Here's a really great application of Purpose as a motivator. Long ago, there was a world-wide event where we put up the griffin towers in Loping Plains and Nektulos. You went there, did crafting or gathering quests, and there was a little tally that showed you how far along everyone had got. When we finished, the tower was up. Permanently. We changed the world. That's meaningful. We got little tokens in the mail for participating.

Something like that was done for the spires to the Overrealm, too. Culminating in a fight with dragons. But they had to spoil it with extrinsic rewards: house items and titles. Hence, other people were jealous because they hadn't logged in that weekend and missed it. Honestly, I think the answer is not to have less of these events but to have more, and give out little or no extrinsic rewards for them. The Amish raise barns for basically a big picnic. Purpose, the chance to do something worthwhile and meaningful is powerful. I'd like to see more of it.

Taking Fun Seriously

Serendipity abounds. I've been slow posting, and in the meantime, several items on the topic of "It's just a game, isn't it?" have come to my attention. First up, bunny ears.

It seems that to celebrate Easter, WoW introduced a new achievement which required players to find a female character from one of each of the races and catalog put bunny ears on her, presumably using some sort of gizmo. No permission of said female toon was required.

Some of the women objected. To them, a line was crossed and their avatars were sexualized without their permission. Many in the gaming community reacted just as is expected when challenged: It's just a game. It's just an avatar, it doesn't mean anything.

Credit where credit is due, Raph got here first:

But boy, avatars is a pretty special case. We have a lot of “specialized hardware” around this in our brains, and avatars tend to trigger a lot of it. For example, the fusiform face area or FFA is a part of the brain that seems to be involved in facial recognition, and also seems to fire off when identifying specific objects with fine distinctions (for example, it fires in birdwatchers when identifying birds, and in car aficionados when recognizing specific makes and models). The interesting thing is that the FFA activates even with iconified faces — with stuff that we just think of as a face.

It may be a game, but it isn't just a game. Your body and your mind reacts to it pretty much as if it's life. Some people manage to be pretty detached about the experience, but then that's true of life AFK, too.

Here's how I feel about it. People take their appearance seriously. WoW has lots of "zap someone's appearance" toys, but most of them only work on group members. So there's some form of implied permission there. The height of a players's avatar will affect their behavior, and so will the amount of "eye contact" another avatar is giving you.


So, I think WoW blew it here. It's not the moral equivalent of murder, but the moral equivalent of slapping a "hottie" sticker on the back of women at the park. I have little patience for those who argue that "people wear bunny costumes all the time, it's celebrating the Easter bunny." There are two problems with this, first, the people who wear the costumes choose to do so. Second, that's not the only meaning of bunny ears, which have been associated with sexual availability for at least 50 years.

Geez, just ask anyone who is a fan of manga and anime. The acheivement didn't require you put ears on male avatars, did it? I think there's be a lot less issue if it had. No, the female characters had to blow kisses at males. Doesn't that strike you as being a bit, umm, one-sided.

Anyway, not a mortal sin, but a mistake on Bizzard's part.

MMO's Teach the Wrong Thing?

His post is nearly two years old, so maybe it's old helmet to a lot of you, though it just came up on another mostly-non-gaming blog I read. David Sirlin writes on Gamasutra about the fact that games, all games, teach real life lessons well beyond their window dressing. And that WoW, and by extension most MMO's, teach the wrong lessons.
To paraphrase David, the bad lessons are:

• Time spent means more than skill.


• Groups are more important that solo.


• Guilds are all-important and exclusive.


• It's not enough to follow the implementation of the game, you must adhere to "Terms of Service"

So, does time spent mean more than skill, and is that a bad thing or a good thing?

Grind to 80, raid 4 times a week, as a new part time job, get your mythical. That means you're a great player, right? Do enough TSO missions that you have a full set of high-tier armor and jewelry. That also means you're a good player, right? Farm (sparklies/rares/masters) endlessly to get enough cash for the adornments you need to trick yourself out.

I don't think this is wrong, but I don't think we'll ever be shot of it. At the core, what's behind this is the idea of meaningful work. Malcolm Gladwell's latest, "Outliers" addresses the concept in explaining high performance. He cites two main criteria to define "meaningful work":

1. The work must be complex enough to not be boring
2. The work must show an apparent benefit: working must show that things are different somehow in a way that you like, in a way that is readily apparent to you.

Most of the stuff in MMO's qualify under that definition. Even when you are working on something very long term, you get intermediate rewards. For example, I have earned the title "Exalted" from the Concordium by grinding many many writs for the Concordium. Most of them were in Lavastorm in my low 40's. Each time I finished a writ, I got a little more status and faction. Every once in a while, I passed a new faction level, and could get new titles and house stuff. And in the end I got the title "Exalted Toldain Darkwater", which I turned on so everyone could see it.

Was that skill or just time spent? Probably some of both. Commercial MMO's that use the subscription model have a financial interest in getting their players to keep playing, so they add in these time-consuming chores. Now a title has absolutely no effect on how well your character can carry out game functions, or how valuable you are to a group or a raid.

On the other hand, endless grinds for critically important gear creates a big problem in my mind. I'm not talking about a two hour instance. The endless grind for Void Shards gives me this feeling though. As does the long faction grind necessary for the tradeskill epic, and for the best tradeskill stuff in TSO. Perhaps the problem is that it gets too repetitive, and thus, boring.

In contrast is all the stuff one needed to do to get the Hammer that ported you to Jarsath Wastes. You needed to max out 3 factions, however, you could do this by doing quests, each one which had you doing something a little different, in a slightly different place. The final quest had some fun storytelling and animation to it as well. On the whole, a medium long task, but interesting and a unique reward.

Most people are motivated strongly by peer approval and want to be seen as competent or skilled. And to the more immature and/or insecure, that means they have to have the best gear, even if it means losing sleep and having no life outside of EQ2.

Leveling seems to carry some of this time-sink function as well, though I didn't always see it that way. But I'm not normal, when I log on, I ask myself "What can I do today that would be fun?" instead of "What can I do today that will level me up, or get me better gear". But as it stands, the "Ding" from leveling and the "grats" from your guildies makes it a big, non-random reward for playing.

For all of these things, some skill is required. There is a learning curve, and being better will make things go faster. But as in life, smarts only takes you so far, and there's a point where being smarter doesn't help -- you still have to put on your hair net and get to work on the assembly line.

MMO's employ positive (and negative!) reinforcement, maybe it should have been random reinforcement? The problem with non-random reinforcement, where you get a reward every time you do the desired behavior is this: If the rewards stop, so does the behavior.

Random reinforcement, where a behavior is rewarded sometimes, on an unpredictable schedule, reinforces behavior that "has legs". The reinforced behavior will die very slowly after all rewards have been removed. In order to use this principles, MMO's would have to be rethought from the ground up. For one thing, I think you'd have to get rid of leveling and quests. Ok, but where would the fun be?

Well, I can see from the length of this post that this is a rich topic, which I will have to return to. I started out thinking "Right on!" when I read David's assertion that "Time spent is more important than skill". Unfortunately, I'm not sure that that isn't an accurate lesson about life, if not a satisfying one.

Eighty percent of success is showing up -Woody Allen

Legitimacy in MMO's

Brian Green, also known as Psychochild, has an article up at Gamasutra called "Legitimacy for Game Developers". Brian identifies three kinds of legitimacy

Financial Legitimacy means making money and being a viable medium for business. Older media often do not have to worry about this type of legitimacy; for example, people rarely publish poetry with the hope of making a large profit -- it is often done as an act of prestige. Many new media, such as computer games, prove themselves in this area first and that helps gain other forms of legitimacy.

Artistic Legitimacy is how the people working in the medium see it. For example, how do you see your job as a game developer? Do you think you are making art? Do you think you're making mere entertainment?

Do you do games until you can break into a "real" creative medium like movies? Do just collect a paycheck? Do you work in games because of the creative opportunities? The answer to those questions influence how legitimate games are as a medium.

Cultural Legitimacy indicates how much society respects the medium. Is the medium worthwhile to spend time on, like reading books, or is it considered a waste of time? In many western societies, we respect the concept of "freedom of speech", where we allow people the right to express themselves freely.

Many attacks on creative media have been halted because of the protections afforded by this freedom. Book burnings are often seen as something abhorrent, an attack on the legitimate medium of writing. Yet, some people don't see the same problem with limiting the sale of video games to the point of harm to the medium. This is usually influenced by the other two forms of legitimacy.

I'm not really a big fan of capital-A "Art". It's kind of too self-absorbed. Rembrandt cranked out most of his paintings for rich Dutch merchants who used them as decorations at their lavish parties, more like flower arrangements than precious treasures.

On the other hand, games are a creative work that is meant to engage other people, and as such, it's art. I don't think Brian and I disagree on this point.

Ok, so art has this responsibility to dig up real emotion, to come from pain, to be authentic, to be personal. Robert Frost said, "no surprise for the author, no surprise for the reader." In other words, you can't fake it.

Yesterdays post on blacks on MMO's was a jumble. I apologize. I'm trying to figure out how an MMO can address some of the things about race that I'm currently thinking about.

One of the problems that MMO's have is in projecting character. You don't have much to work with: a few voiceovers, some text that lots of people just click through and don't read, and the character art work. The things that LOTRO has done with the "escort quest" help quite a bit, as the players accompany a character while she or he does stuff. More character and more story there. But it's tough. Player characters are meant to be the central figures in tabletop RPG's, and MMO's have a strong family lineage from them.

The most important stories to MMO RPG's are stories about your character. "I got my epic" is a favorite story, or "I got my Mythical" or sometimes "I made this really dumb mistake that got me wiped multiple times" can be told for, umm, comic relief.

That being the case, if a game dev tries to do the sorts of things to the players that writers routinely do to their characters, the players may nat take it well. "Hey, you, Brian Piccolo! You're going to get cancer and DIE!!!"

That's a good story, but only from the outside. That plot (Google "Brian's Song" for a blast from the past) wouldn't work in an MMO.

If you think about the film (or the book) "The Return of the King" structurally, it's all about death. Facing it, overcoming fear of it, and accepting it, and dying. How can one portray that in an MMO? You can't permanently kill players, and it's hard to portray characters that die, since in fifteen minutes, they will spring back to life so that the next group of heroes can experience their deaths.

I think it's possible to make an MMO with a story arc that involves the death of a favored NPC, but it would depend heavily on instancing and quest progression. As entertainment, it's a risk as well, since Americans at least don't seem all that fond of tragedy. We like our happy endings. But still, things like the success of Dr Horribles Singalong Blog, and for that matter, The Lord of the Rings make me think that maybe a little tragedy wouldn't be so terrible.

I haven't played WoW's latest expansion, but what tidbits I've heard make me think that Blizzard is trying to push the medium in this direction.

In EQ2, there's a quest line in TSO that took my character undercover among the boarfiends, where I didsovered a plot to kill the current Chief of the boarfiends. Since the new regime was likely to be a lot more hostile to us and our interests, we undertook to warn the Chief, but he ignored us, so we were given the task of assassinating the interloper. We fight him, but he runs away before we can kill him. We like to the robot who sent us on the mission, saying that he's been dealt with. We ended up adopting a baby pig which we were asked to destroy, since it's no longer useful.

I like this kind of bittersweet writing. It's done by someone who does take the art that they are doing seriously, as well as the imperative to entertain and engage.

Really, I think this quest line is a good direction.

Typalicious

There is a brand new web service called Typealyzer which will read your blog and calculate a Myers-Briggs personality type for you. I've taken the test many times, and come out as an INTJ. But Typalyzer has me as an ISTP. Swapping P and J is no biggie, it's always very close between them when I test this. But S instead of N is a huge shift, I'm usually very strongly N.

If you aren't familiar with Meyers-Briggs, let me run this down. N is described as "intuitive" and S is described as "sensate". (That's sensate, not sensual, get your mind out of the gutter.) N's like to go with the world of the mind and imagination, whereas "S" types are all about hands-on, concrete reality, sweat, toil, and axle grease.

I'm definitely N, though I've cultivated my S side some lately.

But when I write this blog, there's nothing obvious that turns it into a game taking place in a good part in my (and others') mind. So I use a lot of words like "hit", "attack", "make", "craft", that are the sort of words that "S" types use.

West Karana is rated as an ESTP, and I'd be willing to bet that it ought to be ENTP. Tipa has mentioned that she has a programming background, and programmers and S types just don't intersect much.

I'm going to be snickering about this the rest of today.

The Proteus Effect

Nick Yee, of Project Daedalus did some interesting work in his doctoral thesis, in which he studied something called the Proteus Effect. Namely, he showed that what toon you play has an effect on your behavior. By using virtual reality to manipulate the attractiveness and height of experimental subjects, they became more agressive (height), or more willing to approach another person more closely (attractiveness), or disclose more information about themselves when asked (attractiveness).

Nick was even able to cancel out the possibility of "priming" or the sort of social feedback that other's reaction to your toon's height or attractiveness has by changing what the confederates in the VR-implemented experiement saw. That is to say, even though the subjects saw themselves as taller (or more attractive) in the VR environment, the people they interacted with did not. I say, that's pretty slick.

But really, what us gamers want to know is which toons will level faster, don't we?

Well, Nick has an answer for that, too. Sort of. First of all, he gathered data on height and attractiveness for all the different races of WoW. (I know, it's not Everquest, darn it. But we can still learn from it.) Attractiveness was based on a toon with randomized appearance, and given ratings by an independent panel, probably composed mostly of college students. Here's the ratings:



Dr. Yee then sampled characters from WoW over the course of a couple weeks and ran regressions to see if the levels of character correlated to attractiveness and/or height.

Yes, yes it did. The most attractive race (Human) was on average 2.7 levels higher than the least attractive. The tallest race (Night Elf) was on average 4.5 levels higher than the shortest. Dr. Yee is careful to say that this might not be causal, since more serious players might choose taller toons. And notice that popularity seems factored out of this analysis, so the wild popularity of Night Elves maybe doesn't mean as much.

Nick points out that the average playing time in WoW to get to level 60 is 480 hours. That's three work months, by the way. I'm not sure if EQ2 is shorter or longer than that, though it's in the ballpark.

In thinking about this in Everquest terms, I note first that there are virtually no trolls at the high levels of the game. Well, or at any level. Folks just don't want to play trolls. If you go on a raid, you will see lots of toons that are sexy (Night elves, wood elves, half elves) or tall (Barbarians, Ogres, Kerrans). There are far fewer gnomes, halflings or dwarves. Arasai and Fae certainly exist at the high end, but not in great numbers.

Now I have friends in-game who play gnomes, halflings, dwarves and Fae. Some of them leveled pretty fast. I'm not trashing y'all, but I'd like to hear from you. Have you also played a tall toon? Did it make a difference? Did it make you feel different?

Inquiring minds want to know.