Lenny Raymond's Blog

Measuring MMO Usage

There's a great post on Raph Koster's blog on how to measure user populations in MMOs, and some of the comments are really insightful too.  Worth a read.  [here]

China Taxes Virtual Worlds

Virtual Worlds News reports that the government of China has imposed a tax of 20% on income earned in virtual worlds currency / for selling virtual goods.  This was inevitable, but is still hugely significant: it is bound to force a rationalization of property rights laws as the pertain to virtual worlds, and because gold farming is an inherently transnational business, China's tax and property policies are going to back up into the rest of the world very quickly.

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. 

Netherlands Court Determines Virtual Goods are Real

Its about time a proper country (no offense to Vanuatu) started acting sensibly and recognized that virtual goods can be every bit as much property as tangible goods.  I hope this sets a precedent for the EU, and then the WTO.  Thanks Virtual Worlds News.

Time for a 'Net Politician

There is a really insightful, thought provoking post on BLDGBLOG about how American politics, and politicians, are fixated on the notion that rural, small town America is the "real" America, and its values and problems are the ones that should be of greatest concern, whereas in reality the vast majority of Americans live in urban environments and the domestic problems of greatest importance to the nation are fundamentally urban. The well argued point of the piece is that knowing what it's like to live in an apartment New York City is far more relevant to knowing how to govern than is knowing what it's like to live on a ranch in remote Montana.  One of the factoids cited by the post is that there are more World of Warcraft players in the United States than there are farmers.

The fact that there are more WoW players than farmers in the country, I think, speaks to a larger point.  There are now far more people in the US that effectively make their livings, spend the  majority of their leisure time, do most of their communicating & socializing, and consume most of their media in cyberspace than there are farmers (or firefighters, or doctors, or you name it). While these people are not a coherent demographic group, they share a lot of concerns, have more than a few values in common, and are effectively addressed in more or less the same way - put those things together and you have a group that politicians should court. As today's kids who are natives on Twitter, Club Penguin, Facebook, etc. grow into increased political activity they will become a powerful social force, and possibly a powerful voting block.

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....

Office of the Director of National Intelligence Studies "Cyber-Behavior"

Danger Room posted that the ODNI's Special Security Center has awarded two contracts to look at "cyber-behavior."  On the face of it, this program may be a bit alarming to some, but it's worth noting that it is from ODNI-SSC - the people who control the grant of clearances, not operations people who do the real spying - this isn't the DNI spying on your journey to Outland; it's also worth pointing out that this is maybe a good thing. 

Alarm bells may be ringing because one could (rightly) expect the Intelligence Community to misinterpret "foreign national contacts" in Warcraft, for example, and withhold clearances from some potential good hires because they are in a guild with some Syrian and PRC nationals.  After all, the government has more than it's share of clueless alarmists when it comes to things "cyber" and especially when it comes to games and virtual worlds. However, if these studies are well done, they may prevent this kind of misinterpretation, and it will be all to the good.

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.

Beating Google

Great post over on Jeff Jonas' blog.  His point is basically that search is increasingly going to be about context, and the next competitive frontier will be in capturing context to make search smarter and more effective (gross oversimplification) check it out here.

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."