earthx.org blog

To step back and critique my own weblog rhetoric for a moment: sometimes I think I sound too glib and dismissive. There, I said it. I’m working on it.

I don’t mean to make the creation of persistent, self-sustaining game structures sound like something easy, something that anyone can do once they realize the absolute truth that’s sitting right in front of them. Obviously, a working persistent and emergent design is really quite a challenge, and that some games are doing it with a degree of success is pretty impressive.

SWG moves toward it, I think, through the Galactic Civil War as a dynamic, organized PvP structure and through the flexibility and modularization of profession trees. I think this works pretty well, actually, though it was unfortunate that the “hologrind” subordinated the profession trees within a roughly linear structure whose endpoint was force-sensitivity.

I imagine that the “hologrind” was conceived by developers as a counter-move against the desire of a player to reinterpret SWG not as an emergent persistent world but as a game structure that could be mastered. Give the power gamer something really hard to do, and let him go do it while the rest of us enjoy the game as it was meant to be experienced.

This brought about new issues. The hologrind didn’t occur in a vacuum — rather than successfully isolating the obsessively goal-oriented players, it impacted the game and meta-game economies as large-scale systems.

(That it did so speaks, I think, to the complications of engaging not only game impulses but story-reception impulses in-game through the license of Star Wars, as well as to the inadequacy of “power-gamer”/”role-player” as a binary way of understanding the ways players make use of a persistent world game space — but that’s my dissertation chapter.)

Second Life, of course, does persistence very well, but it’s also almost completely relinquished “game” as a concept. I don’t know yet if that makes it a departure or a forerunner.

Elder game (as invoked here — scroll down the page to “Support the Elder Game”) as a concept assumes that a given MMOG is in essence two experiences. The first is a roughly linear experience that ends when you “beat” the game by achieving ultimate level x. The second, a sustained or self-sustaining game or games for those who have no more worlds to conquer. (One can, of course, defer or interrupt the second experience by extending the value of ultimate level x.)

I’m still thinking this through, but my feeling is that this structure is more bifurcated than it needs to be. In acknowledging the need for an elder game, one acknowledges that one is conceiving of an MMOG as a structure with an assumed terminus or point of exhaustion, after which another game must be initiated.

In other words, the need for a distinct “elder game” seems to say that we haven’t fully thought through persistence as a design challenge. Persistence doesn’t mean you need a new game for when your game runs out, but that an MMOG structure that “runs out” in the first place is problematic given the persistent nature of the form. If one has to build something to follow the “endgame,” then the initial game structure isn’t really a persistent world game — it’s a non-persistent game that, logically, gets exhausted. If you build the game ab ovo with a fundamental strategy to handle persistence as a formative pressure, it seems like you could avoid the issue altogether.

There is, of course, also the need to make elders feel special, but surely there’s got to be a way to do that in a game where everyone gets self-sustaining gameplay to enjoy.

I’ve been playing City of Heroes and thinking about this a lot, given that power gamers conquered level 40 at breakneck speed and will conquer level 50 just as fast. What will sustain City of Heroes? Of course, the answer is City of Villains, which introduces PvP as a self-sustaining mode of play to the space, albeit one with its own controversies and concomitant issues. I’m looking forward to seeing it.

Really good blog entry from Greg Costikyan: Seven Rules for a Successful MMO.

I’m going to write some entries of substance soon, seriously. It’s been a crazy few weeks.

Spider-Man adapted to an Indian audience. Link via boingboing.

The Network is the Game from this year’s GDC, by Amy Jo Kim.

During a Bloomsday Google I came across this thought-provoking message from Jorn Barger’s Joyce portal on Joyce and artificial intelligence.

Happy Bloomsday.

New Wookiee armor looks all Predator and stuff. Very nice.

New wookiee armor makes wookiees look all Predator

I haven’t been playing SWG for a while, because I’m addicted to City of Heroes (I hope my older
entries on CoH didn’t give the impression that I don’t think it’s great, because it is great. I just want it to still be great a year from now… and I’m a little monomaniacal about the superhero genre). I think I’ll get back into it for this armor, though.

Just a life update, as much for me as for any reader… I’m trying to do a little life-organization today.

The revised dissertation draft is now in the metaphorical hands of my supervisors, Dr. Newton and Dr. Slatin, both of whom have been absolutely fantastic throughout the project. Once I get the go-ahead from them, I can distribute it. I’m scheduled to defend on August 18.

I’ll post a decent abstract on the dissertation sometime soon, but, briefly, it’s meant to set up a theoretical framework and then perform some analysis on two target “fiction networks” — the DC Comics universe and Star Wars: Galaxies — based on that framework. It makes some hypotheses about the effects of persistence, proprietorship (branding), scale and intertextuality on a number of popular forms of fiction. There are, of course, plenty of distinctions made among the forms of representation and activity at play within these common phenomena. I’m not totalizing current games, film, and comics, just trying to understand contextual pressures that I think inform all of them.

Now that that work is winding down, I’m shifting my focus exclusively to persistent world games and virtual worlds for the remainder of the year. In the dissertation, I raise some questions and present some arguments on the position of fiction or genre conventions (the “story,” in essence, but I’m not talking necessarily about narrative: I’m targeting environment, events, embedded story or “lore,” and rule structures) in persistent world games, and I’m hoping to see how they play out in practice.

The case study work I’ve been advertising for involves interviews, participant journaling, and think-aloud protocols with gameplay: this research is intended to extend some of these arguments I make in the dissertation about immersion and perception of fiction, and to consider how player and developer experiences confirm, refute or complicate my assertions. (By the way, I’m still looking for Second Life residents in Austin).

I’ll be presenting this data separately from the dissertation, with a slightly less theoretical and slightly more pragmatic perspective, in whitepapers for the DMC, articles, and conference papers.

I’m also finishing all the books that I’ve subjected to “tactical dissertation strikes” but wanted to enjoy more thoroughly… Bartle’s Designing Virtual Worlds, Salen and Zimmerman’s Rules of Play, Mulligan and Patrovsky’s Developing Online Games.

I’m also playing a lot of City of Heroes. I’ve never created as many characters for an MMOG as I have here, and after talking to other players I’ve concluded I’m not alone. Anyway, after a recent merciless culling my remaining characters are:

• Picture (lvl 7 Defender (Shadow), Freedom)
• Gates (lvl 8 Blaster (Fire), Freedom)
• The New Urbanist (lvl 2 Controller (Mind/Radiation), Freedom)
• The Big Shock (lvl 7 Blaster (Electric), Victory)

Feel free to send me a tell sometime.