The latest results from the giant EQ2 data research project came out a few days ago, and this time they center on gender. I’ll just point straight to the summary from Terra Nova:

• Men are more driven to achieve within the game space, and women are more driven to socialize, although these differences are not as large as one might expect.
• Female players fall into two distinct categories: stereotypically feminine players, typically brought into the game by a partner, and very hard-core players.
• The hard-core women are more intense than their male counterparts: “The top 10% of male players played an average of 48.86 hours per week, while the top 10% of female players played an average of 56.64 hours per week.”
• Female players are healthier offline than the males. This is especially true among older players.
• When males and females play together within a romantic relationship, the males are less happy and the females more happy. When not playing in a romantic relationship, these outcomes are reversed: the females are less happy and the males more happy.
• There are a surprisingly large number of bisexual females playing, but not males. While male bisexual players stuck to the national average, females were about five times higher than the national baseline rate.
• Females under-report their playing time more than males.

via Terra Nova: Gender differences in MMOs.

The full paper can be gotten here (scroll down a bit) but you have to register or purchase it.

Randy Farmer (he of Habitat fame, and much more besides!) and Bryce Glass have been posting excerpts from their upcoming book Building Web Reputation Systems on a blog, and today’s has a great anecdote in it that hammers home all the math behind negative reputation systems.

“Hi! I see from your hub that you’re new to the area. Give me all your Simoleans or my friends and I will make it impossible to rent a house.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m a member of the Sims Mafia, and we will all mark you as untrustworthy, turning your hub solid red (with no more room for green), and no one will play with you. You have five minutes to comply. If you think I’m kidding, look at your hub-three of us have already marked you red. Don’t worry, we’ll turn it green when you pay…”

If you think this is a fun game, think again-a typical response to this shakedown was for the user to decide that the game wasn’t worth $10 a month. Playing dollhouse doesn’t usually involve gangsters.

– Building Web Reputation Systems: The Blog: The Dollhouse Mafia, or “Don’t Display Negative Karma”.

There’s whole rough drafts of chapters on the site — totally worth reading, pondering, absorbing, and using.

Regular blog reader mrseb has a blog post up on emotional avatars in virtual worlds inspired by this NYTimes.com article (it’s behind a reg wall).

In short, the research is about how important blushing is as a social lubricant, as evincing embarrassment or shame serves to reinforce the social rules held in common by groups of people. It’s a sign that the person knows they are transgressing to some degree and is sorry for it, and people judging them tend to treat them less harshly.

Which leads Sebastian to ask (emphasis mine!),

Why are we still running around in virtual worlds with emotionless, gormless avatars?

It’s not that the question hasn’t been asked before. For example, back in 2005 Bob Moore, Nic Ducheneaut, and Eric Nickell of PARC gave a talk at what was then AGC (you can grab the PDF here)., which I summarized here with

The presentation by the guys from PARC on key things that would improve social contact in MMOs was very useful and interesting. Eye contact, torso torque, looking where people are pointing, not staring, anims for interface actions so you can tell when someone is checking inventory, display of typed characters in real-time rather than when ENTER is hit, emphatic gestures automatically, pointing gestures and other emotes that you can hold, exaggerated faces anime super-deformed style or zoomed in inset displays of faces, so that the facial anims can be seen at a distance… the list was long, and all of it would make the worlds seem more real.

I was at that talk, and in the Q&A section, which was really more of a roundtable discussion, the key thing that came up was cost.

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Still confused about this use of the word persistence; coming here with the dictionary meaning and trying to understand a seeming contradictory concept.

— David, in a comment in the earlier post

The technical sense of the term arises from “persisting something to the runtime database.” The base states are usually in a template database of some sort, along with all the other static data. The template database is read-only as the game is running, and only developers get access to it. The runtime database is where everything that players do goes. (See here and here for more).

The base data in the static template database doesn’t count as “persistent” or “persisted” because it’s actually baked into the world’s rules in some fashion, as a starter state. Delete everything in the runtime database, and that map will still be there, usually. You will have playerwiped WoW, but the world of WoW will still be there: every loot drop, every monster, every quest, every house.

The virtual world definition of the term means “to save changes on top of the base dataset.” So a base character starts with no real gear and newb stats, and a designer sets that up in the template database as the definition of a newbie character. But we save their advancement. That’s persisting a character to the runtime database. The stats and gear might go up OR down, but they are different from the base.
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Massively asks, “Are MMOs truly as persistent as they claim?”, prompted by a blog post over at Player vs Developer. The Massively piece actually takes off in quite a different direction than the original blog post, because the post is about how much game developer changes to balance and systems affect the perceived value of a given character. But the question that Massively asks is more direct: are MMOs really that persistent?

And the answer is unequivocally no.

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The full log of a great Q&A session with Richard Bartle in Metaplace has been posted up on the Metaplace Forums. It was a wide-ranging discussion, attended by over 70 people. Richard’s dry wit was, as usual, on full display.

A typical, provocative, snippet:

[05/26/09 13:13:10] gguillotte: I’ve been watching procedurally generated content for a while. Love comes to mind, a PG MMO. What sort of impact is this going to have, where content generation is automated?

[05/26/09 13:13:45] Richard: it depends if the generation of the content is the game or is filler
[05/26/09 13:14:11] Richard: procedural content can work – I’ve spent many, many hours playing Rogue for example
[05/26/09 13:14:42] Richard: using procedural content to create a canvas for virtual worlds seems a perfectly rational thing to do
[05/26/09 13:15:22] Richard: however, the designer has to put their soul in it somewhere: either this is by modifying the procedural content or by creating the framework that creates it
[05/26/09 13:15:59] Richard: now the former is the traditional way for designers to speak to players; if a designer wants to speak through the content-generation rules, well
[05/26/09 13:16:12] Richard: that would be possible but we don’t have the vocabulary for it yet

[05/26/09 13:16:28] gguillotte: Thanks.

[05/26/09 13:16:31] Richard: that makes it an interesting time for us

[05/26/09 13:16:38] gguillotte: Indeed

[05/26/09 13:17:11] Richard: Metaplace is a similar thing, btw – we’ll see things here that we haven’t seen the like of before

[05/26/09 13:17:21] Cuppycake: (We already have!)

[05/26/09 13:17:24] Richard: which is why I’m so enthusiastic for it
[05/26/09 13:17:55] Richard: I don’t mean new worlds, I mean new ways of communicating through world creation

Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research has published a special issue, EQ: Ten Years Later. Among the articles:

• Nick Yee on “Befriending Ogres and Wood-Elves: Relationship Formation and The Social Architecture of Norrath”
• Greg Lastowka on “Planes of Power: EverQuest as Text, Game and Community”
• Sal Humphreys on “Norrath: New Forms, Old Institutions”
• Lisbeth Klastrup on “The Worldness of EverQuest: Exploring a 21st Century Fiction”
• Bart Simon, Kelly Boudreau, & Mark Silverman on “Two Players: Biography and “Played Sociality” in EverQuest”
• Eric Hayot and Edward Wesp on “Towards a Critical Aesthetic of Virtual-World Geographies”

There are also interviews with Chris Lena (with whom I worked in the R&D group at SOE back in the day, and who was producer on EQ for years); and with Brad McQuaid and Kevin McPherson. The interviews don’t appear to be recent, but they still give some great insight.

BMQ: Back when designing EverQuest and coming up with the various playable races, we looked at the more human-like races and decided purposely to make them in appearance similar to real world races. This is true also for the architecture, a lot of the background, etc. But the important point is that what we were trying achieve was familiarity. In other words, the Barbarians in EQ might have had a Scottish flavor to them, but they are not Scots; likewise the pyramids on Luclin might appear to be Egyptian in flavor or style to a degree, but there is no real relationship. This allows the game designer (or fantasy author, for that matter) to create races, cultures, architectures, etc. that draw on the richness of the real world in terms of depth, without actually being constrained by actual real life history or stories or, hopefully, if done right, too many preconceived stereotypes.

…is quite wonderful. It basically makes the case that freeform play (and even user-created content) should be the elder game on top of a more directed and guided play experience — and that we don’t tend to see this because of historical divisions between player types.

Here’s the PDF.

PS, I’ve periodically gone digging to find the origin of the term “elder game.” Anyone know? This old MUD-Dev post references the moment when it probably became common currency…

We’re laying out Metaplace Central again. We have iterated it a lot, as we try out different flows, add new tech that makes it more appealing, and so on. These days, what with the balloons, the board games on the table by the cafe, and the many teleporters to user worlds, layout is growing more challenging as we strive to both fit everything in and also make it a social space.

Musing on these problems not only made me dig out my copy of A Pattern Language but also reminded me of how 8 years ago I did a brief examination of the maps of two popular cities in what were then two popular MMOs: Ultima Online and EverQuest. These days, the science of zone layout has improved a lot.

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Chat is never enough.

It should be a truism, but far too many social virtual spaces and even sites have fallen down in this regard.You build a social environment, maybe theme it a little bit, and sit back and expect people to turn it into a vibrant community. But nothing happens. It doesn’t catch fire. It doesn’t ever form the nubbin of a community.

It’s probably a cliche to even bring up pearls. Pearls happen inside oysters and mussels (or at least they used to, before we all got used to artificial ones). They aren’t formed around grains of sand specifically, but rather around irritants of many sorts, usually quite tiny ones. The pearl is a protective mechanism, something that wraps around the irritation. In the wild, this happens very rarely — you have to go through hundreds of oysters to find a pearl, and even then, it might not be much of one. But since the 1920s or so, we have cultured pearls, making them happen on purpose.

In the last long post, I talked about how to make a game world more social. In this post, I want to do the opposite — talk about ways to add the irritant that causes the pearl to form. Social interaction is a pearl of great price, especially in worlds devoted to it; and yet, this pearl does not form easily without prompting. And the prompting often takes the form of an irritant.

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