Your mother taught Chevy Chase how to bowl? *blink* I do believe that wins you the thread, sir.

Bowling is a pure skill game. Pure being the key word.

There is a plateua that you hit naturally before you become a “student of the game”. That ramp is where casual gamers live. You know, the ones who raid thrice per YEAR.

Banana Republics and Renegade Pesos. But he says he’s never been in another song.

Tryin’ to find what is ailin’, livin’ in the land of the free.

Can’t it be more simple? Runnin’ from the freezin’, flu-inducing rain and screaming life everwhere? And of course, the lure of the sea. Hopin’ to find some fun.

I made once the off-hand disparagement of Big Buck Hunter for which I was chastised (as if the chastiser worked on that game) to the defense of equally disparaging Golden Tee, while snarking about how lucky we are that we sometimes get Galaga and singing the praises of foosball. XBox == JukeBox.

Too far and not far enough at the same time. Talk about NPC Permadeath. A cool and artistic castle in the sky.

In many cases it’s important to ask: are these features due to the developers or is it what our audience wants?

Often people who play Meridian 59 complain about something in the game. I will often tell them, sometimes in public, “you can leave, and the game will still be here when you want to come back in the future.” This creates an almost unbelievable amount of outrage when I say this! “That’s not good customer service!” people cry out. No, but it’s honest.

I think on some level the audience for our traditional games, especially the “hardcore” that stick with a game for over 10 years, want these games to be the way they are. If you want to use the bar analogy, they want our games to be Cheers where they’re part of the central cast. They want everyone they care about to shout, “Norm!” (or “Psychochild!”) when they log on. Yeah, there’s other people in the bar and sometimes the core players sometimes change, but they know where they’ll be for several hours each week.

On the other hand, most gamers are neophiles. Why does bowling not get complaints of “being a grind” despite being more mind-numbingly repetitive than anything we design? Someone who goes bowling isn’t looking for a new experience every night. Someone playing games usually does want a new experience; this is mostly, I’d argue, because the single-player game industry encourages it so people buy new games. One could also argue that games are much more compelling than bowling. I go bowling with friends not because I like bowling, but because I like my friends. The bowling is an excuse to socialize. For some people, this is the same attitude we have about games. I don’t love WoW, but it’s an excuse to play and keep in touch with my friends (and learn more about the game for game developers). (Of course, it’s possible there’s more WoW players than regular bowlers, so perhaps bowling isn’t a great example….)

My thoughts.

Why are we more like theme parks than the neighborhood bar?

Part of it (though certainly not all of it) is that neighborhood bars have a captive audience. There are a finite number of bars in your neighborhood and only a fraction of those will fit your preferences (drink selection, pool tables, TVs). Online games have to be more ferociously competitive, because they can’t rely on geography to limit their competition.

I think the holy grail of virtual world stickiness really is your social circle. It’s interesting to me that no game has yet come along that made it very easy for me to get my friends online. I’ve got a host of friends interested in games and gaming, but we’ve never established a guild and played together on an MMO, because the friction is enormous. We all have to be willing to drop $50 on the same game at about the same time, willing to pay the monthly fee, be on frequently at the same time (and my friends and I keep weird schedules), and derive satisfaction from the same aspect of play (questing together, raiding together, grinding together).

Progress on that would involve 1) greasing the skids on getting my friends on the same game (e.g. letting two or three people play off a single box purchase, at least temporarily), 2) allowing some sort of delayed interaction even if my friends aren’t currently on (see facebook for examples of unsynchronized socializing). And I don’t mean mail. Something deep. Let me run their characters as NPCs and decorate their house. 3) Exposing in-game content and even functionality outside the client so people can take some action and maintain the social link even if they don’t have time to log in. and 4) something brilliant I haven’t thought of.

To some extent, maybe it’s even possible to represent a social link fundamentally in the game mechanics. Right now it’s more useful for me to have a lvl50 character with me that I don’t know than a lvl40 character run by my best friend, even though it’s in the interests of the game developer to have me playing with my friend as much as possible.

A virtual world needs computers, which cost a lot to operate even if no inhabitants visit. Meatspace geography is land, usually a secure investment; virtual world geography is computer hardware, assets that depreciate quickly over time (to $0 value over three years if you ask the I.R.S.)

A player that pays you money but does not log in is described by many server programmers and producers as ‘the perfect customer’. However, it does not lend itself for having a cohesive and interesting community.

Hmm, potable bottled friends. Can’t get that at WalMart!

Even when we attempt to create a content heavy theme park experiences, a percentage of users (a very high percentage of my users) will just hangout as if it’s the neighborhood bar. They will treat your creation as nothing more than chatroom. That’s ok, because content is expensive and can be a bit of a trap. There is often a disconnect between how creators think their worlds are being used, and how they are actually being used. I guess it’s embarrassing to discover that players care more about the people they meet than the stuff that you spent so much money shoving into the world. Club Marian is basically the neighborhood bar. There’s too little content to call it anything else. Other MMOs advertise right under it, so I expect players to leave and rely on the stickiness of people to bring them back. It’s earned back it’s development costs 1.5 months after release mainly because neighborhood bars are way cheaper to make than theme parks.

Excellent.

Something of note too, in RL those impulse racks at the checkout counter aren’t nearly as effective now as they were when they first went into practice. Watch most people waiting in the checkout lines at your grocery store. They avoid looking at the impulse items, and even often make an attempt to dissuade their kids from “wanting”. My point is that that sort of thing gets very old, and people catch on to what it’s about, and eventually start to even avoid the impulse activity as if it’s an insult to their intelligence, and contrary to their real needs and desires.

Games, on the other hand, due to their extreme availability, are almost as if that checkout impulse rack is being shown to everyone outside the store, and catching all those who are susceptible to the impulse.
But that leaves all those who avoid impulses. That’s got to be huge and unrecognized market, somewhere out there.