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Innovation, evolution, and adaptationJanuary 9th, 2006 |
I’ve seen a lot of folks argue against changing certain elements of how virtual worlds are made today on the grounds that the medium has evolved into a genre, on the grounds that because there’s now a strong trend of making these worlds in a particular way, that we should go with the flow. There have been comments made here on the blog, for example, saying,
Some irreversible choices have already been made. The people who are growing this genre are making interesting choices within the parameters of the genre. You, I submit, are not because you are too busy wondering “what if we had gone with silicon-based life instead?” That moment has come and gone. New irreversible choices are being made right now, and if you want to have any input in them you need to accept the ones that have been made in the past.
If there’s one thing that people often have trouble grasping, it’s that evolution isn’t about progress, it’s about adaptation. It is about maximizing survival under given conditions.
Progress is a cherished myth. Mind you, I’m not saying that all progress is illusory. But it’s certainly true that we tend to apply it to many areas within which it doesn’t necessarily have meaning. In those areas, “progress” is essentially a value judgement.
For example, we might speak of longer human lifespans as having signified progress compared to the terrible short lifespans of the past. And yet, we have ample evidence that in many earlier cultures, lifespans were actually quite comparable to today (even the Bible speaks of “three score years and ten” — my own result on the linked test predicts 82.5 years unless I lose a quick twenty pounds). We also have ample evidence that a full yet shorter life may be more desirable than a long and empty one. Our choice to call longer lifespans “progress” is dependent on both a value choice and on selective memory.
It also means that writing off the silicon-based lifeforms can be a terrible mistake, because someday we might find ourselves as their prey, should conditions change. Given the number of iPods hanging from ears, phones at belts, and computer screens hovering before our eyes, I’d say silicon-based entities are making a strong play for at least parasitic status.
The nature of evolution
What evolution is really about, rather than progress, is adaptation to conditions. Should our world stop requiring higher level cognitive function (which would, of course, involve some sort of truly massive catastrophe), then we might well evolve to have vestigial brains. We would instead evolve other characteristics that helped us to survive. I think few of us would term this “progress” for the human race.
The evolution of virtual worlds has not been a story of progress; rather, it’s been noted for years now that it’s largely a story of recapitulation. Lessons learned once have to be learned over and over again; many of the games we play today have direct antecedents in text designs. Depending on the value judgements you could make, it could be stated that there has instead been regression, rather than progress. Consider, for example, that by the mid-90′s the following well-established sorts of persistent virtual worlds existed:
- Games of collection
- Games of hacking and slashing
- Games of nothing but questing
- Team based PvP games
- Free for all PvP games
- Hub-and-instance worlds that embedded games ranging from flight sims to battle mechs
- Roleplay-enforced worlds both with and without combat systems
- Pure chat spaces
- Educational spaces
- Collaborative writing spaces
- Virtual meeting places for professional interests
- User-created worlds
- Procedurally created worlds
- Worlds intended for programming practice
- Worlds that were basically game shows
- Immersive recreations of favorite fictional worlds
- Non-Euclidean worlds
- Simulations of historical periods
- Simulations of real world physics
- Simulations of large-scale populations
Many of these have proved to be “evolutionary dead ends,” which merely means that they did not (yet) justify the expenditure of thousands to millions of dollars to recreate them in the days of graphical dominance. Is abandonment of perfectly viable (and indeed, audience-satisfying) design paradigms “progress”? Yes, if you make a certain value judgement. No, if what you value is in fact the direction that many claim the commercial virtual world industry is heading: endless nichification.
If in fact, that is where the market pressures lead us, then we will certainly see the demise of the big games such as those I have made, such as the current market leader. Market pressures are ineluctable forces, the equivalent of the changes in climate that lead to evolution and extinction.
A few analogies to other industries
A recent GameSpot article discussing innovation in the game market opened with Edward Murrow’s classic statement on television:
This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box.
Television has evolved dramatically over its relatively short history. It’s evolved notably over just the last twenty years, some forms calcifying into staid dogma (such as the three-camera sitcom) and others changing quite radically, such as the evolution of the police drama from Dragnet to Hill Street Blues (which defined most of our modern conventions of the TV drama) and thence to the 24s and Law & Orders of today. Almost all of the pressures that shaped this trajectory were commercial.
While we may point at, say, The Shield and Battlestar Galactica and compare them to Dragnet and, well, Battlestar Galactica, and say that there is clear evidence of progress, we must also acknowledge the presence of Johnny Knoxville and Growing Up Gotti. What has occurred overall is adaptation, and we’ll see yet more as channels continue to proliferate and nichify.
The game industry is frequently compared to the movie business, even though they don’t have much in common in most ways. It’s worth examining the ways in which the movies have adapted to market realities.
The economic equation in Hollywood is driven not by box office, but by home video sales and international markets. International markets require iconic, easily localized films, not ones with complex dialogue or content that is too culturally specific. Home video sales require movies that folks with disposable income will buy and collect. Even though the box office take isn’t the most significant figure to the movie studios, it’s pretty important to the movie theaters — and they need concession money, which means they need their popcorn and sodas to sell. And they sell primarily to teenage males, primarily over the summer when teenagers have a peak of disposable income and time.
Given this, most of Hollywood is an adaptation to that market. It’s a wonder we get to see anything but movies with big explosions. But in point of fact, there are other forces that Hollywood must adapt to — internal ones. They need to keep their brands — er, stars and name directors — happy. These folks are happy to make money, but they also are in the arts to do stuff for themselves. So the studios will literally write off gigantic productions for the sake of the relationship. This force is not yet real in the gaming world.
In point of fact, we can see uncomfortable echoes of the narrowing of genres within the spread of virtual worlds offerings in the narrowing of genres found today on the shelf of the typical video store. It’s treated as a rarity to see a biopic, or a musical, or a serious documentary. Are these genres less worthwhile? Or is it perhaps just that the successes of Ray, Chicago, Super Size Me were unforeseen by the industry to a large degree? All of those genres have been written off at one time or another, just as Westerns are less than popular today, yet enjoyed a minor Renaissance in the days of Unforgiven and Dances with Wolves.
Video games have had their own loss of genres. The 2d shoot-’em-up is largely a cult genre today, akin to the noir, perhaps. The wargaming, vehicle sim (excepting high-performance race cars), and classic adventure game have seen serious declines in fortunes, though adventure games are now enjoying something of a comeback. In the early 80s there was an explosion of game designs, and today, each of those game designs could be considered sufficient to found a genre. By contrast, today we make games in only a very few genres, and the thing preventing those others from finding shelf space is purely a matter of costs, not of viability as games.
It isn’t only the entertainment products that adapt to the marketplace. The players also change in response to the entertainment products, and the marketplace as a whole. Darniaq rightly points out that real-money trades, or RMTs, are an adaptation on the part of players to the situations provided them in current virtual worlds. Were nothing persistent in these worlds, then there would be no RMTs.
RMTing has been little more than a by-product of people being impatient in a game designed to mete out rewards over a period of Time. People could stop buying, and close the market, but the market exists for the same reason all markets exist: there is a Need.
This Need is not an intrinsic one. People do not get born craving possession of virtual swords; rather, RMT is an adaptation to the particular stimuli and circumstances provided by virtual worlds as they are currently incarnated — it is, therefore, “a natural evolution” for online worlds by the lights of those who see current worlds as progress. Should a virtual world be designed with no items and fingerprint authentication for logging in, it will have far less RMT than today’s worlds. Would that be progress? Perhaps, perhaps not.
Genres, adaptation, and learning
Games in particular have a notable problem with refinement. The direction of evolution and adaptation tends to be only in one direction: complication.
Consider the fate of poetry in the Western World. Recently, Poetry magazine received a grant for $175 million, which seems an extraordinary figure, until you realize that the entire bequest is on par with the budget of one of the blockbuster Hollywood movies in a given summer. As Dana Gioia, head of the National Endowment for the Arts, and a damn good poet himself, has observed,
Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused inward. Reputations are made and rewards distributed within the poetry subculture. To adapt Russell Jacoby’s definition of contemporary academic renown from The Last Intellectuals, a “famous” poet now means someone famous only to other poets. But there are enough poets to make that local fame relatively meaningful. Not long ago, “only poets read poetry” was meant as damning criticism. Now it is a proven marketing strategy.
During this time, did poetry in fact lose its grip upon human life? Of course not. In the span of fifty years, it and its marching companions of jazz, orchestral music, and painting marched towards an audience of the elite. And yet, there are song lyrics galore being memorized by teenage girls in their bedrooms. There are raps being performed on street corners. Hallmark still prints verses in its cards, and anthologies of comforting religious verse march out of bookstores in pious rows. Smooth jazz fills our elevators even if no one listens to the children of bebop, movie soundtracks have retreated to the Romantics rather than pick up with Charles Ives or much less Stockhausen, and there’s no shortage of pretty watercolor landscapes to hang on hotel rooms, even if nobody understands why attacking a urinal with a hammer is art (or indeed why the urinal was art in the first place). Verse found a different adaptation, and the main trunk followed instead a course that is known to lead to problems: it grew increasingly formalist, increasingly complex, increasingly self-referential, insular, and demanding.
The same might be said of FPS game developers, also a startlingly inward-looking culture. And there’s something awfully true about the declaration “only wargame designers play wargames.” The thing about genres is that they tend to breed priesthoods, and once a threshold of complexity is passed, soon only the priests can play. Is Advance Wars: Dual Strike the smooth jazz of wargaming?
We see ample evidence of this trend in the modern virtual world. Here’s a medium where the dream is elegant and simple. No one was ever seduced into virtual world play with jargon — they were captured by the dream of a Place that was Elsewhere. “Be someone else, somewhere you can’t be, and do things you couldn’t do, with your friends.” That’s the core appeal. And yet today we can write editorials pondering the inaccessibility of the way we speak about these games:
I was LFG for a while, so I went to Gusgen to fight Wights for a chest key drop, so the next time my RSE time comes up, I can just find a treasure chest and get the pants for my WHM. Then I went to Pashow, leveled my NPC a bit and managed to raise my staff skill, in addition to making about 34k from some nice drops. I finally got a party, which was a sorta-Manaburn that worked out well (we had a NIN and DRK for some reason), got about 5k XP using an Empress Band, called it a night, and then found a Morion Tathlum in my delivery box- was an Xmas present from a friend in my Shell.
Indeed, words to conjure dreams of metaverses with.
What we’re looking at here is the problem with praxis. A place where learning colludes with habit.
In poetry, the genre was the form, and the content was carried by that form. In games, the mechanics are the form and the content; the “content” is something else layered on top for those times we wish to have more of an interactive narrative experience. The mechanics are left to change very little, in the name of accessibility, whilst we forget that the modern game isanything but accessible to those who are not gamers in the first place. The burgeoning evidence thereof rests in the wild popularity of so-called “casual games” on the web, which are anything but casual to the hardcore aficionados.
The fact is that the disdain for “casual games” arises not out of the level of investment they require as their moniker implies; rather, we look down on them because they are simple in mechanics. We’re being elitist and saying that it’s not good music unless it has a complex time signature, not real art unless it makes an arch comment on society, not real poetry unless it reflecting sound poetry.
The longer games go on demanding player knowledge of every game prior in their genre, the more likely they are to end up where poetry did.
“We will only understand what we have already understood.” – Lyn Hejinian (one of those contemporary poets you haven’t read).
Markets, Bose-Einstein condensates, and monopolies
In the end, the reason this is then troubling is because it effectively caps the market. As fans of the medium, we may be choking it to death with our own fandom. Oh, we can’t see that right now, when WoW is on top of the world, but once upon a time flight sims were on top of the world too, and wargames were top sellers. Building only on what has come before leads to genre nichification because it excludes newer players from the genre, demanding higher and higher levels of skill and sophistication for mere entry.
Gamespot dug deeper into the innovation question, and got Neil Young at EA to say,
EA cross-referenced Metacritic review scores for the top 30 games of the last three years to spot trends, and they found that the best-rated games all had “1-3 meaningful innovative features that strike at the heart of gameplay.”
This would be the rating being done by hardcore gamers in hardcore publications for hardcore gamers, talking about features that are completely invisible to ordinary people.
In his fascinating series of posts on game genres, DanC at Lost Garden describes the factors that lead to the death of a genre. He concludes that genres die when their template is defined, when the outline of the mechanics is established and a single “genre-king” game emerges that summarizes and defines the potential of the genre. The market is then taken over by the craftsmen: people who master every aspect of this template and create incremental changes on it. Perhaps told to manage 1-3 innovations per title, one imagines.
But unfortunately, this is not what retains users for the genre. In the terms of A Theory of Fun, it is because these games do not offer the player the chance to continue learning. The dressing is seen through, and something repetitive begins to surface. These may be very well-crafted games, mind you; but they are crafted to a rococo level of embellishment, and only appeal in the end to the true fan of the minutiae of the genre.
The truest craftsmen amongst them rarely make a comeback. They succeeded because they were polishers, not innovators. They fade into obscurity, unable to escape the rigid lessons learned during their long ascension to mastery of a faded genre.
- DanC, Lost Garden
In terms of network effects, we can see this as a preferential attachment network. When new nodes join the network, they have a preference to join the node that lots of other nodes have chosen, which leads to a classic power law distribution (and in fact, the populations of virtual worlds exhibit exactly this distribution).
If there is the ability to switch, the natural tendency is towards monopoly. And in fact, if you observe the soul-crushing dominance of CounterStrike among FPS players, you’ll see that it has not only been the #1 online FPS for years now, but that it holds an uncomfortably large market share.
But there’s another factor here. Power law distributions that exhibit strong monopolistic tendencies also tend to stop growing in total area. In other words, the more dominant the principal product in a segment is, the less likely that said market will continue to grow. The analogy used in some books on networks is a Bose-Einstein condensate, that state of matter wherein every atom has the same quantum state — and there’s no energy.
Genres need diversity in order to expand. Or, phrased another way, a medium needs to not fall into genre if it wants to evolve or adapt. Perfect market adaptation to a niche is also death. The reason why companies need to chase innovation is because otherwise, they are not pursuing a growth strategy. This is at the heart of the “blue ocean” metaphor that has recently become a popular meme in game development circles. The blue ocean is supposed to be the possible market space opened up by a game that is not a clone of a template. The red ocean is the one filled with the blood of game cloners who followed the template and got chewed up by all the other sharks out to make a buck.
In the end, I’m rooting for the silicon-based lifeforms. I’m saying that indeed, we do need to decide consciously to take roads not taken, in defiance of current practice. Yes, many of those choices may well be bad, and many of them may well not pan out. But if evolution were solely about adapting perfectly to an existing niche, we’d never have grown legs and crawled out of the water. It’s also about periodic beneficial mutation that opens up new horizons, perhaps not even the ones we were aiming for.
We can take some comfort in knowing that we do not only adapt to the ecological niche; the niche also adapts to us. I’ll say it bluntly: some virtual world will come along that will make all the current ones look like amoebas, and it isn’t going to be because it has more levels, more classes, more races, and more three-letter-acronyms. It’s going to be a disruptive innovation, out of left field, and it’ll make the current market quiver in its boots the way dinosaurs quivered when they saw the first puny mammal.
Remember what Murrow said:
This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box.
So, let’s determine. Enough of the defeatist talk, and enough of the satisficing design that says “what we have is enough, and players like it, and why are you discarding the whole praxis?” Markets change. Audiences change. Today’s top predator is tomorrow’s museum exhibit. This is not all there is, this is not all there can be, and we should not fear talking about what might have been and can still come to pass.
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) and I also don´t think that the big studios will move in a way that momentarily decreases their income. They can still survive by creating said variations of already invented systems.
[...] http://www.raphkoster.com/?p=245I’ve seen a lot of folks argue against changing certain elements of how virtual worlds are made today on the grounds that the medium has evolved into a genre, on the grounds that because there’s now a strong trend of making these worlds in a particular way, that we should go with the flow. There have been comments made here on the blog, for example, saying, Some irreversible choices have already been made. The people who are growing this genre are making interesting choices within the parameters of the genre. You, I submit, are not because you are too busy wondering “what if we had gone with silicon-based life instead?” That moment has come and gone. New irreversible choices are being made right now, and if you want to have any input in them you need to accept the ones that have been made in the past. [...]
[...] Another lengthy screed.http://www.raphkoster.com/?p=245I figured the jaded folks ought to join in. I was thinking of some of you when I wrote it! [...]
Evolution and niches
Raph posted another interesting screed over on his site (http://www.raphkoster.com/?p=245) talking about evolution and how we have to adapt or die as game developers. It’s worth a read, so I recommend heading over there and reading it.
Of course, I…
[...] Raph Koster has posted a lengthy missive about what innovation means within the Massive genre. Raph characterizes innovation and adaptation as entropic effects in the videogame industry, draining the energy from a niche as it codifies to meet market demands. Darniaq elaborates on the ideas presented at Raph’s site. He goes into what critique has traditionally meant (or not) to MMOGs, and other aspects of what makes the genre unique. [...]
[...] Team Less is More Reading: Wikipedia entry on Scientology vs. the Internet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_vs._the_Internet The Church of Scientology’s Response: http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/scientology_briefing.html Optional Further Reading: Scientology Homepage: http://www.whatisscientology.org Primary Anti-Scientology Site, Operation Clambake: http://www.xenu.net Team Rockstar assignment – Virtual Economies Tom Loftus, “Virtual worlds wind up in real world’s courts” (Feb. 7, 2005) – http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6870901/ AP, “Virtual jobs in virtual worlds yield real cash” (Nov. 4, 2005) – http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9925794/from/RL.1/ Chinese gamer sentenced to life, BBC June 2005. Assignment: Visit eBay and search the auctions for virtual items for sale. Suggested search terms: World of Warcraft, EverQuest, Second Life. Read the description of at least one item. Raph Koster, “Innovation”- http://www.raphkoster.com/?p=245 …on the philosophy of online worlds. [...]
[...] evolution, and adaptationBrilliant stuff.tagged: game, gaming # // posted by Josh @ 11:58 AM Comments: Post a Comment <<Home [...]
[...] Raph Koster: Innovation, evolution, and adaptation [...]