[...] am I particularly cogent after the fact so for those keenly interested in the reportage check the index on Raph Koster’s website or the SoP site.  If you need some pre-filtering help then I [...]

Hypothesis: after perhaps the third or fourth month of play, and certainly after the first year, players are chasing the high, driven by memories of high-stimulation events. Travel is rarely a high-stimulation event. Ergo…

[...] many other people live-blogged the event, so for a more detailed account I recommend a look at Raph Koster’s list. My personal highlights included Koster’s own keynote presentation, learning about Dmitri [...]

I can only say that analogizing players to water is kind of an example of what I’m thinking about, and you seem pretty aware of that–it agglomerates players, makes their agency and actions into something natural to be channelled. I’m not really sure that when you’re looking at group or social dynamics that it helps to think about them as a single system, in fact. Or to forget that developers are part of the same system, not necessarily standing from somewhere outside of it, building channels.

The way designers have to approach this is not that different from someone dealing with any other relatively chaotic system. Let’s take flowing water as an example. We can see water flowing in a direction, and we can see turbulence. We can’t always see under the water, and even then, when we drop something in there to affect the flow, it doesn’t always do what we expect. Our ability to control the flow is rather crude.

Our job in this case is to get the water to specific places. But our ability to do it scientifically is still pretty limited. We rely on hypotheses which may or may not be accurate.

Does the water resent those trying to build canals? Maybe. Players often do resent developers channeling them.

Do canal makers resent the water? Maybe. And it can be very dangerous and damaging to both parties and the community they share. It may be that taking the step back to see the water as a whole dehumanizes the individual players in a way that creates propensity among developers to regard them as Other in some way. On the other hand, when dealing with group dynamics, we all know it is often more fruitful to look at the systemic characteristics of the stream rather than the individual molecules of water.

On chasing tails — I am very struck by the notion that the panel was overwhelmingly pessimistic. Have you been a real developer bitch session, a GDC rant, or the like? We were moderately upbeat! Seriously.

It’s not that developers in general or you in specific condescend to players, that’s really not what I mean. What I mean instead is that you especially have a strong view that what happens in virtual worlds is often a result of problematic or flawed player responses to essentially neutral or functional mechanics. You’re quite honest (to the limits of NDA constraints) about when a design is so technically screwed up in some respect that it is the primary cause of a problem. But when things aren’t going entirely as you want in terms of social practices and player behavior, you’ve tended to attribute that to some deep ‘prior’ cognitive, social or cultural disposition on the part of players (Theory of Fun is premised in part, for example, on the proposition that game-playing is driven significantly by pattern-recognition and exploration of patterns), that players want to do something (and can’t help but want it) that messes up design, forces compromises.

Travel mechanics I think in this case was the topic that triggered this thought for me–you (and others on the panel) suggested that players want instant gratification, that they want to be with their friends or accomplishing economic goals *right this instant*, regardless of what damage that does to other functionalities in a virtual world. So you frame this as, “We can’t give them what they want because it would be bad, but I guess we can give them a bit of it, and lose something else good.”

I think you (and I and everyone) should be curious about that: are we sure that’s why players hate travel times or travel mechanics? Why are we sure? How universal is that motivation? Maybe travel mechanics are a synecdoche for something else they don’t like about virtual worlds: the degree to which obstacles and goals in most worlds feel arbitrary, are signed “by the developer” rather than feeling organically present in the world. Maybe this is really an objection to the lack of dynamism in most worlds, or a preemptive irritation with the way that developers manipulate time sinks for the sake of retention rather than pleasure, using time sinks as an alibi rather than a imaginative premise. I’m not saying those are universal sentiments, but players do often seem to get framed as intrinsically against developer objectives on some deep level, where developers have plans and ideas and will and players have human nature and instincts and behaviors.

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The ‘chasing tails’ observation, somewhat paradoxically, was a thought that you guys seem overwhelmingly pessimistic about virtual worlds in ways that surprise me. If we’re at a plateau, maybe it’s the plateau that says, “these are not the media form that will liberate the world or that we will live in for the future…they’re one more form of entertainment and expression with their own characteristics, and that’s *fine*.” It just seemed to me that all of you were looking everywhere else and saying, “over there, look at teh shiny”.

[...] I think the conference sessions were summarized pretty well by others (Raph, Tim, Bart, Sara, Greg L at Terra Nova, twitter hashtag #sop09), I’ll stick to the people I [...]