Lenny Raymond's Blog

Virtual Currencies :: Real Currencies

There's a good post over on Kevin's Corner about virtual currencies becoming real currencies.  He lays out a nice analysis.  To a limited degree, this has already happened (e.g. QQ Coins, the Octopus Card, Mindark's bank and its bridging the PED to the Swedish Kroner, etc., etc.).  Its just a matter of time, and not much, for

More Mixed Reality MMO Games for Android

From JOYity. Assassin meets geocacheing meets Google Maps. A side from not looking like they are any fun at all, these are pretty cool.

Check out the videos:




Even though I'm ragging on all the iPhone / Android location -based games so far, I think they're harbingers of good stuff to come and I'm glad to see them coming out.

Thanks TechCrunch. 

Parallel Kingdoms - the First Location-Aware Mobile MMO

TechCrunch notes the first iPhone/Android location-aware MMO, Parallel Kingdoms, is launching soon.   I love location-aware games (worked on my first one in 1998!), and I'm a big believer in MMOs on mobile, and a proponent of mixed reality games, but I'm not so sure about this one, despite it being a cool idea on some levels. I have to admit, I haven't played it yet, so my interpretations may be way off base, but ....

Aside from rough graphics, which can be forgiven or overlooked for a lot of games, Parallel Kingdoms has some serious issues. Moving large distances in physical space does nothing to make the game more fun, but certainly makes playing it actively harder and more time consuming. There is no real-world physical tie-in to the online component, so essentially, moving in the real world is just using the world as a cumbersome, gigantic controller for a purely virtual-space game. Of course, the use case, as demonstrated by the company's video, is that people will semi-passively play in a go-about-your-business / tower-defense mode.  Maybe, but that doesn't sound like a level of engagement that makes for a compelling experience. On top of that, it is an MMO, so there should be some sort of social component to it, but social games require a certain density of proximate players to work, so a game like this might work in dense city centers and on campuses, but even that is a bit of a stretch.  Nevertheless, cheers to the Parallel Kingdoms peeps for trying something new.

Doing a geocacheing meets Assassin meets MMO for mobile would be pretty interesting.  The mechanic practically writes itself, and the business model was obvious 11 years ago....

Questions to Ask an MMO Developer

I was recently asked about performing due diligence on an established console game developer working on an MMO.  I came up with a quick starting list of questions to get an initial read on the team.  I think they might be helpful.  A genericized and condensed list is below:

• What is your design expertise wrt multiplayer mechanics? How do mechanics scale from SP, to 2P, to MMP? Where do game-per se mechanics meet metagame mechanics and what is the importance of each in a persistent world game?
• What is different about “level design” in an MMO vs. a SP game?
• What is your philosophy of balancing a game (e.g. do you like RPS type mechanics or do you like homeostatic systems,e.g. Catan, or something else)?
• When is it good / bad to shard and why?
• What is different about art production in an MMO vs. and SP game?
• What are your philosophies of polishing pre/post ship for an SP game vs. an online PSW game?
• How do you plan to add post-ship content?
• What is your method for testing for balance and rebalancing, prelaunch?
• How does/should balancing/rebalancing interact with live operations in shipped game? How does this interact with economic or quasi-economic systems in the game?
• What are your guiding principles in designing the internal economic model of the game (if you plan to have one)?
• How does the revenue model work with the game mechanic?
• What kind of design choices invite farming, bot usage, and other pathological play behaviors - what if anything should be done to counter or design for these things?
• What do you think makes for a good subscription model game vs. a good free to play / item sales game?  Are there other revenue models you’d like to try? Why?
• How would you fit UGC into an MMO? What are the major issues in including UGC?
• What is the team's expertise wrt large scale, high transaction-level database-driven applications?
• What kind of overall architecture is good for an MMO vs. an SP or networked, but non-PSW game?
• What is the team's security background, and what is the security model for the game?
• What is the team's networking background?
• What is the team’s plan, and capability to manage, liveops?

This is obviously far from an exhaustive list, but it's a place to start.  The main point of these questions is to get at whether the design will be executable and if the game has a chance of being fun. "Right" answers to these questions won't guarantee either, but wrong answers will pretty much ensure that the game won't ship on time / budget and/or that it won't be fun and will fail.

Great Post on Credit Card Fraud in MMOs, Plus Lots of Other Good Economic Stuff

Thanks, Jeremy Liew for your post pointing this article out.

Over on WorldsInMotion there is a great interview with Gene Hoffman, CEO of billing and fraud management company Vindicia, on credit card fraud prevention in MMOs. It's well worth reading just for the fraud prevention angle, but it also contains bits of casually dropped wisdom on the economies of virtual worlds that are actually the real goods in the interview. For instance:

"These are real economies. In fact, they get much closer to the raw creation of economic growth than many national economies as these "virtual" economies prove quite convincingly that wealth isn't capital or labor but instead knowledge and creativity. Building a working infrastructure to support capital inflows and outflows in a trustworthy manner is very much a core problem we want to address."

Games that Persuade

I'm going to contradict myself again.  Not really, but after a great conversation with my buddy Christophe this morning, I feel I should expand on my advergames post of a few days ago.  Christophe recently attended the Games for Change conference, and we talked about that and some social-good -minded games projects he has in mind.  I modify what I said before - great games can have an axe to grind.  That axe will just probably never be Axe Body Spray.

While I believe that games need to be about fun first and foremost, great games, like all great art, are fueled by passion.  Most of the time, the passion that drives a great game is that of a designer to find expression for a brilliant game mechanic and/or a revolutionary aesthetic (e.g. The  Sims, Starcraft, M:TG, GTA).  Sometimes the passion that drives a great game is a love of history, or the expression of a certain set of values (e.g. Medal of Honor / Call of Duty).  There's no reason that this kind of passion in combination with brilliant game design can't come from the desire to achieve some social or cultural goal - we just haven't seen it yet.

Normally, I hate it when people compare games to movies, for reasons too numerous to list in this post.  However, I think that we are at an inflection point in games where the sources of inspiration are going to start changing, and the history of movies is illustrative.  When making movies became less about the technology of getting images on film, and when the audience's familiarity with a rich and established idiom became something a director could count on, more complex ideas could be conveyed.  It isn't unusual for very commercially successful movies and tv shows to have messages, be they overt or subtle.  In fact, it's unusual for successful and sustainable franchises to not have something to say.  Game production tech has evolved to the point where the means of production are within the reach of many, many more people (and different kinds of people), and the audience has matured in its understanding of the medium's grammar and vocabulary. 

At their core, I believe great games will always be about great game mechanics because mechanics are the fundamental source of player engagement and what makes games a unique medium. However, I think it will become normal for commercially successful games to make a point.

Oh No! Spore Isn't Even Out Yet and it's Looking Like Second Life!

More at Kotaku

Casual MMO Middleware Proliferation and Evolution

It seems like I hear about a new IDE/middleware solution aimed at the emerging casual MMO market almost every day.  I have no doubt that this market is the future, but I have three questions:

1. is the market emerging fast enough to support all of these companies?
2. what happens when Flash 10 comes out with robust (relatively speaking) 3D support?
3. what happens to these companies when multiplatform access into the same game becomes the norm (it will)?

I think the answer to question one is of course not.  On the supply side, there are just too many companies chasing the space, and more all the time. Of course, there are a helluva lot of games in development too, but regardless of how fast the market develops, the trouble is that there are way too many casual MMOs in development, and there will be even more.  This means there will be a backlash/crash.  So the demand side of this equation is going to look less rosy RSN.   The history of mainstream game middleware engines is illustrative.  There are always two or three engines that come to dominate any particular piece of the space, with the others falling by the wayside one way or another - the lucky losers (e.g. Criterion) get bought and then forgotten about by their acquirors, and the others just disappear.  Even the winners tend to wind up with decent businesses, but not businesses that become empires (e.g. Emergent, RAD, Epic, etc.), or even get to public scale.

Flash 10 will kill any of the casual game engines that require a download or even a browser plug-in.  Installed engines may have a few, or many, technical / performance / graphical  / whatever advantages, but that won't matter in the face of the huge advantage of not having to cross the download / install barrier.  All of the existing Flash dev tool makers will support Flash 10 and all of the existing free or cheap media and user data backends will support it.  All casual game developers will learn Flash 10.  No independent IDE/middleware vendor is going to be able to offer a product that can compete with the Flash ecosystem.  Of course, some developers will ride the development of that ecosystem in different and interesting ways (e.g. Whirled from Three Rings ) and some of them will build nice businesses.

Multiplatform access to MMOs is where the industry is going.  It's been going that way for a long, long time, but it seems to me that it is finally going to get there RSN.  The thing that will finally push it over the top is connected mobile devices.  Soon, if you don't provide access to your MMO via an iPhone (or Android phone, or name your cool next gen computerphone) you might as well not compete.  The implications are that data and interfaces will become much more abstracted (i.e better designed) and backend providers will compete by the quality of that abstraction and the robustness of their data definitions.  Some may also compete by providing hosted services - an MMO backend cloud.  This will give an advantage to the companies that have done big, robust, hardcore (i.e. not casual) MMOs because they will best understand how to do the data definitions and design their interfaces.  The ones with huge user populations will also have an advantage because they were forced to do cloud computing at industrial scale long before there was even such a term.  Of course, those companies have legacy code, legacy infrastructure, and maybe some legacy business practices, so there will probably be an opening for startups built by people with this experience.

Advertising and Games /=/ Advergames – June 16, 2008

In Tim Zuckert’s article in Ad Age “Become One with the Game” there is good discussion, with numbers, about why games should no longer be ignored as an advertizing medium by mainstream marketers. Sound advice. However, I think some of the prescriptions are not quite on target.

First, why this is sound advice: TV viewing, and all oldline media consumption is down and ever dwindling. Nowhere is this more true than in highly sought after demographics like males 18-34, who are leaving TV in droves, largely for the internet and games (and games on the internet). Forward thinking marketers shouldn’t just be going to games because the audience moving there. They should be going to games because games offer interactivity and a means of achieving engagement that passive media just can’t compete with. The only little thing that gets in the way is that nobody really knows how to do this. Making a banner ad into a clickable game of pong doesn’t count. “Click the Monkey!” really doesn’t count.

Making games is hard. Making games fun is hard, and requires more than a little magic. The most talented game makers never set out to make a game with any top of mind goal other than to make a fun game. Remember “games for girls”? Look at the “serious games” scene. Games with an axe to grind are not fun, and not-fun games are not successful. This is why advergames suck. You can’t create magic while your top concerns are showing your client’s brand in the most flattering light and communicating the product’s unique selling proposition.

OK, so I’ve contradicted myself. I’ve said that ads have to move into games and be interactive and engaging, but I’ve said you’ll never make a fun advergame, so don’t bother. Well, maybe that’s where “becoming one with the game” means something different to me than what it means to Mr. Zuckert. P&G doesn’t produce soap operas anymore – they leave it to people who know the form and want to create compelling content for its own sake. That compelling content creates a venue in which soap companies can place their ads. Aston Martin doesn’t produce James Bond movies. The company is content to have a symbiotic relationship with Broccoli & company, which creates a highly compelling venue in which to showcase AM’s products.

Google and Microsoft understand this dynamic, and have each bought startups (Massive and AdScape) that specialize in in-game ad serving. There are several startups that provide product placement services for games. Most next generation game engines support arbitrarily streamed sound and textures that will facilitate live, personalized ad serving without breaking immersion. Some next generation game engines (and a few current ones) allow for objects with scripted behaviors to be streamed into the game, allowing for real interactivity and unique game mechanics to become part of the marketer’s arsenal.

The tools and infrastructure are all there, pretty much. It’s time for forward thinking marketers to become one with the game, not by trying to make their own soap operas or using banners with annoying clickable monkeys, but by understanding the possibilities and working with people who make great games. Talk with Google. Talk with Microsoft. Talk with people who actually make great games. Most important, if you’re a marketing manager and don’t already play games, play a lot of different games and play them a lot so you know what’s fun, what’s not, and why. That way you’ll know what might work for your brand (and maybe how to go about getting there), why you shouldn’t be making advergames, and you’ll have a lot of fun.