vw design

  • Don’t Display Negative Karma

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 23 Comments

    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.

  • Avatar body language

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 15 Comments

    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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  • Defining persistence better!

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 22 Comments

    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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  • Defining persistence for MMOs

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 17 Comments

    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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  • Richard Bartle Q&A log

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 21 Comments

    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