Jeff Freeman has a post on the problems of forums. He seems spot on, particularly suggesting to get rid of dev posts because that way “everyone know(s) their entire org chart, so that players can flip-out any time there’s a change.” More and more, I’m thinking it’d be a better idea to invent a Betty Crocker persona to represent the face of the company. Not as a pseudonym for a particular dev or community relations manager, but a trademark name and likeness that won’t change no matter who you park behind the keyboard. Betty can sign all the posts to the official blog and no one else at the company needs to say anything for the company, except through Betty.

Interesting idea. Sort of already what DAoC does with Sanya Thomas, and they have no official forums.

Grouchy Gnome similarly is reminding us that:” the most important retention tool for a massively multiplayer game is its community.” I’m not just referring to a community as a game’s forum community. It is well-known that a fairly small percentage of players (generally 15-20%) actually participate on a game’s forums. One MMOG’s community spans across the game itself, forums, chat channels, instant messaging services, voice chat applications, and beyond. I just wanted to make it clear that I’m not referring to the forum trolls as a game’s community, because the forum community may not be the most important part of the whole.

He’s right of course. The only problem is the dominant method to communicate game information (help, intros, changes, etc.) is through a game’s forums. I particularly dislike official forums, since you have to wade through often a lot of negativity to get anything interesting. Eve’s forums are well run and so is EQ2′s, but it’s annoying where both are complicated enough that the only real place to get any game information is on the forums. Devs stick FAQ’s, hints and even basic instructions there. So, someone is eventually going to have figure this out. Otherness: Watching DVD Season1 of “The Wire”. Worthwhile series, glad it was recommended by a colleague. Back in The Forge in Caldari Space in Eve. Trying out some of the COSMOS missions. My first one, however, required delivering two artifacts that I can’t find any means to acquire. Annoying. Particularly where I’ll have to troll the forums (see issue above) for hints:/ Happily got my packages finally picked up by Big Brothers, Big Sisters. The gf and I were able to pass on quite a lot. I think they’re a very worthwhile organization. Check them out in your area. Too too busy at work, blogging suffers. I seem to have ended up running an unplanned Beta. Joy. Wishing I had more time to catch up on GDC activities.

Lum has made a kind of wonderful discovery of an MMO from China reported by Yahoo today where the players need to engage in activities that are meaningful to the People’s State in order to advance. The plot revolves around Lei Feng, a humble selfless People’s Liberation Army soldier who, the myth goes, spent all his spare time and money helping the needy and serving the Party until tragically dying in an accident in 1962. “For beginners, sewing and mending socks is the only way to increase experience and upgrade,” said Jiao Jian, a young pupil and online game fan from the southern city of Guangzhou.

Sometimes subtly isn’t necessary. This is one of those times. I wonder if “Learn From Lei Feng” is considered a “serious” game in China? The provider seems to think so: But the developer of “Learn from Lei Feng” said the game was aimed at providing students with the tools to learn the pleasures of helping others, Xinhua said.

I guess this isn’t too surprising. All Western produced and themed MMO’s are all stridently ideological in their own right. All MMO’s are structured around players’ personal time being rewarded by advancement, and that progression is almost always by increasing individual avatar power and wealth. As you improve, you become rich and singularly more powerful. And you mostly improve in MMO’s by killing things and not by being beneficent or community minded. While there’s some social play required (e.g. raids) there isn’t anything close to the social networking and mutual self-interest and support (“guanxi”) that a lot of Asian cultures admire. So, inevitably Western MMO’s are inherently “selfish” by design. So today, here’s an example of a game that purposefully seems to counter that political reinforcement with its own. You still grind, but you grind for reputation, and that honour is gated by NPC’s who dictate your activities. Not really any different from any other MMO, just presented differently, with a different agenda.

If all games are more than just technological artefacts and have aesthetic value, and if that value is sustained and complex enough that it can move the game from being just an entertainment to be considered an “Art” work, then the game has a political message like every other art work. The connection of the ideological and the aesthetic have been known for a while, and the historical proof of their inter-relation has been well charted. Maybe in game artefacts we have a new example we should monitor. Particularly as video games and games in general become more representative of values and activities a culture wants to foster. In today’s case, very deliberately. Otherness: I watched all of Season 2 of “The Worst Jobs in History”. Socialist undertones relevant to today’s post and interesting. History-as-the-Grind. Working my way up to a Cruiser again in EVE. This time for intelligent mining and rat killing. Still waiting to get to some more deeper aspects of the game, like crafting. But PvP aside, still gated by lack of ISK, which seems dumb (i.e. big ship enables PvP which requires ISK which requires time, ergo “MMO business plan”). On that note… wondering about all those wonderful expansions. Starting to bother me that I can never even see, let alone participate in a lot of end game content like EQ2′s new KoS, or WoW’s high-end raids. You know, it really is the case that providers build 2 games — one, for the people to level up to the cap; and two, for the people to play at the end cap. Not an original point, but it’s bugging me… needs thought. Was the reason I dropped DAoC completely. DDO didn’t even provide an end game — just a grind to get to a level cap — and I haven’t unwrapped my box after buying the digital download and playing through the free preorder. Very bizarre MMO’s are as games.

Funny enough, it’s nearly been a year since EA flew me out for a day of interviews at their Vancouver hub. I was treated very well, outside the interview. And for good or ill I didn’t get the job. But anyways, this caught my eye as I reminisced: But now EA is stumbling, and a big part of its time-tested strategy is about to change. The company hopes that its next mega-franchise will revolve not around a football star, a boy wizard, or a dashing British spy, but…a microbe. The game is called Spore. Developed by Will Wright, the creator of SimCity and The Sims, it lets players design an invertebrate in its primordial stages and then guide its evolution until the creature’s offspring develop into a thriving civilization with cities, religion, and spaceships. EA’s ambitious goal is to create more such innovative, internally developed games while lessening the company’s dependence on professional sports and Hollywood movie franchises. Cf. BusinessWeek

Sneer if you want to, but seeing a bit behind the curtain there are some talented, well-funded and well-maintained people in those curvy halls. Also, getting off of expensive, faddish, and questionable licensing deals is also smart. You always want to create, and thus control, your own franchise (e.g. The Sims). This was also interesting – enforcing agile software development and de-centralize development (and de-centralize business ownership? I know from my interview the tech managers bemoaned all the infighting there between independent business teams.). Neil Young, general manager of EA’s Los Angeles studio, has been working on a way to encourage innovation while boosting the staff’s morale and competitive spirit… Young has broken the development staff into small six-to-eight person “cells” and assigned each cell a small mission for the game… The idea is to embed technological advances in every detail of the game. “What I’m trying to build is a studio of gamemakers,” says Young.

So that is commendable and is the right approach in my tiny opinion. If you keep dev and technical groups (dev, cm, qa, ops, pjm, tech writers, even tier2-3) small you have a much better chance at faster, more agile communications, and ultimately more esprit de corps. You can design, develop, certify, document and deploy products in less than 12 months, which EA and AOL does (they have a 10 month process plan, we have can do it in 4 in Voice).

The problem, however, is when those organizations are themselves within big companies that are not well-run matrix, projectised organizations. Or at least, sensitive to commercial software engineering issues. That is, it’s great to have de-centralized dev, but if you are still run by a business team that competes with every other business team you are carried along in a game of n-dimensional chicken, as everyone competes against everyone else for marketing dollars and to be the one’s blamed for delaying the other come back-to-school or U.S. Thanksgiving. That is not a healthy software development environment. Having Balkanized business teams in your company doesn’t help anyone, no matter how talented your artists and developers may be, since they’ll be continuing to struggle against inputs (business requirements) and project constraints (time, money, quality) they have no influence over. In simple terms, your controlling organization behaves in a way that’s inimical to your manufacturing organization – key & lock don’t fit. This is why so many companies large and small have trouble getting good products, or sometime anything, “out the door”. The competitive challenge starts at home. People have trouble with doorknobs (the most difficult interface evar!).