designcult

What I'm thinking about this week

1. Boots! In January 1996, I was in London briefly, following a semester at Glasgow University. I bought a pair of Dr. Marten's boots from the flagship store in . They were a sort of wingtip half boot, and I loved them. That's them up on the right there. I've owned various boots over the years, and these were worn more and over a longer period of time than any others. Only a pair of boots acquired from Stompers in the 90s came close. The latter have been relegated to "garden use only" for a while now, and the Docs are just thrashed. Neither model is still made (though there are some things that come close). So last week, we went over to the Haight St. and I picked up a pair of Langstons in burgundy. And I'm in love all over again ...
2. Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix. Despite being married to someone who knows a great deal about art history, I basically knew nothing about this painting or the painter (though I knew the image). I listen to the wonderful In Our Time BBC podcasts, so I got a thorough introduction from Melvyn Bragg's usual group of slightly dotty British academics. 
3. The history of finance, and investment theory. Not my usual area, but I'm being guided by Adam Nash's personal finance reading list and working my way through one by one. 
4. Visual (and to some extent audio) design in classic science-fiction movies. (And one newer one.) The ones with the white palettes, san serif typefaces and shininess.  Think 2001 and Saturn 3.  Also Tron Legacy, but the shiny white bits rather than the glowy black bits. Plus sinister computer voices like Hal and GladOS from Portal. The fun part is this relates to the previous item (at least in my head).
5. How most of the important developments & conflicts in online identity & authentication were predicted (sort of ) by Max Headroom. 
6. Occupy Wall Street. There's a lot to think about, but this post pointing out how strangely some of the OWS dynamic echoes Bruce Sterling's 1998 book Distractions I had to reread it. Sterling has a knack for predicting future socio-political events in ways SF doesn't usually quite do (see: drone assassinations in Islands in the Net). Distractions isn't nearly as good a book as Islands in the Net, but it has it's moments, and it certainly resonates today:
   
   

   “Why are there millions of nomads now? They don’t have jobs, man! You don’t care about ‘em! You don’t have any use for ‘em! You can’tmake any use for them! They’re just not necessary to you. Not at all. Okay? So, you’re not necessary to them, either. Okay? They got real tired of waiting for you to give them a life. So now, they just make their own life by themselves, out of stuff they find lying around. You think the government cares? The government can’t even pay their own Air Force.”

   “A country that was better organized would have a decent role for all its citizens.”

   “Man, that’s the creepy part — they’re a lot better organized than the government is. Organization is the only thing they’ve got! They don’t have money or jobs or a place to live, but organization, they sure got plenty of that stuff.”

Bits and pieces from Reality is Broken

Another book finished: Reality is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How they can Change the World by Jane McGonigal. I've seen Jane speak at SXSW -- she's phenomenal. The core ideas are not new to me (because I've seen her speak), but she fleshes them out in more detail & adds some nuance and research. Which is nice, and increasingly rare for a Current Thinky Book -- I'm getting frustrated by books that don't have anything more to say than what the author's 20 minute TED talk said.

Anyway, these are the bits that caught my eye. More definitional & pragmatic, so more from the front of the book--the back of the book is more the world-changing ARG stuff, which is fine but not what I'm looking for right now.

First, an examination of two related concepts: hard fun and fun failure. (Funnily enough a Berenstein Bears book I was reading with my daughter also covered hard fun.)

Hard fun is what happens when we experience positive stress, or eustress (a combination of the Greek eu, for "well-being," and stress.) From a physiological and neurological standpoint, eustress is virtually identical to negative stress: we produce adrenaline, our reward circuitry is activated, and blood flow increases to the attention control centers of the brain.  (p 32)

But without positive failure feedback, this belief is easily undermined. If failure feels random or passive, we lose our sense of agency—and optimism goes down the drain. As technology journalist Clive Thompson reminds us, “It’s only fun to fail if the game is fair—and you had every chance of success.”

That’s why Nicole Lazzaro spends so much time consulting with game developers about how, exactly, to design failure sequences that are spectacular and engaging. The trick is simple, but the effect is powerful: you have to show players their own power in the game world, and if possible elicit a smile or a laugh. As long as our failure is interesting, we will keep trying—and remain hopeful that we will succeed eventually. (p. 67)

Next, some detail around Your MP's Expenses, a crowdsourced investigation by the Guardian after the UK expenses scandal (you may remember the floating duck island incident):

The game interface made it easy to take action and see your impact right away. When you examined a document, you had a panel of bright, shiny buttons to press depending on what you’d found. First, you’d decide what kind of document you were looking at: a claim form, proof (a receipt, invoice, or purchase order), a blank page, or “something we haven’t thought of.” Then you’d determine the level of interest of the document: “Interesting,” “Not interesting,” or “Investigate this! I want to know more.” When you’d made your selection, the button lit up, giving you a satisfying feeling of productivity, even if all you’d found was a blank page that wasn’t very interesting. And there was always a real hope of success: the promise of finding the next “duck pond” to keep you working quickly through the flow of documents.

A real-time activity feed showed the names of players logged in recently and the actions they’d taken in the game. This feed made the site feel social. Even though you were not directly interacting with other players, you were copresent with them on the site and sharing the same experience. There was also a series of top contributor lists, for the previous forty-eight hours as well as for all time, to motivate both short-term and long-term participation. And to celebrate successful participation, as well as sheer volume of participation, there was also a “best individual discoveries” page that identified key findings from individual players. Some of these discoveries were over-the-top luxuries offensive to one’s sense of propriety: a £240 giraffe print or a £225 fountain pen, for example. Others were mathematical errors or inconsistencies suggesting individuals were reimbursed more than they were owed. As one player noted, “Bad math on page 29 of an invoice from MP Denis MacShane, who claimed £1,730 worth of reimbursement, when the sum of those items listed was only £1,480.”

But perhaps most importantly, the website also featured a section labeled “Data: What we’ve learned from your work so far.” This page put the individual players’ efforts into a much bigger context—and guaranteed that contributors would see the real results of their efforts. (p. 222-223)

What I like about that is how easily you can imagine applying some of these things to non-investigative crowd-sourcing situations.

Also on crowdsourcing, a warning against building in compensation schemes:

The logic behind these practices is that if people are willing to contribute for free, they'll be even happier to contribute when they're compensated. But compensating people for their contributions is not a good way to increase global participation bandwidth, for two key reasons.

First, as numerous scientific studies have shown, compensation typically decreases motivation to engage in activities we would otherwise freely enjoy. If we are paid to do something we would otherwise have done out of interest--such as reading, drawing, participating in a survey, or solving puzzles--we are less likely to do so in the future without getting paid. Compensation increases participation only among groups who would never engage otherwise--and as soon as you stop paying them, they stop participating.

Second, there are natural limits on the monetary resources we can provide in a community of participants. Any given project will have only so much financial capital to give away; even a successful business will eventually hit an upper limit of what it can afford to pay for contributions. Scarce rewards like money and prizes artificially limit the amount of participation a network can inspire and support. (p. 242-3)

Finally, an explicit crowd-sourcing=MMORPG analogy with Wikipedia:

Second, Wikipedia has good game mechanics. Player action has a direct and clear result: edits appear instantly on the site, giving users a powerful sense of control over the environment. This instant impact creates optimism and a strong sense of self-efficacy. It features unlimited work opportunities, of escalating difficulty. As the Wikipedians describe it, "Players can take on quests (WikiProjects, efforts to organize many articles into a single larger article), fight boss-level battles (featured articles that are held to higher standards than ordinary articles), and enter battle arenas (interventions against article vandalism)." It also has a personal feedback system that helps Wikipedians feel like they are improving and making personal progress as they contribute. "Players can accumulate experience points (edit count), allowing them to advance to higher levels (lists of Wikipedians by number of edits)." (p. 230 -1)

Slides for Pig-faced Orcs: Can designers learn anything from old-school roleplaying games?

Someday I'm going to learn to write short titles.

This talk was ridiculously fun to put together, and even more fun to present. I was surprised (and pleased) to have a chance to play some D&D (4th edition Red Box intro rules) the night before—a perfect warmup.

Many thanks to the fine organizers and attendees of the 2011 IA Summit. It was lovely.

Thinking back over the talk, I think I followed my own advice inadvertantly. Give them something to manipulate—I handed out 20-sided dice to everyone who showed up. Leave gaps & messiness—I didn't have a software example for the last point. The audience supplied great ones, so that worked perfectly.

So, here are the orcs.

Pig-faced Orcs: What designers can learn from old-school role-playing games

View more presentations from James Reffell

On borrowing ideas

If you think you operate in isolation from other designers, gamers, and the culture at large, you're mistaken. And worse, if you don't look at similar problems and systems, you're undercutting your chances of a successful design. You can get creative raw materials this way because, for all creative work, your materials are ideas. This isn't to say you swipe text and settings and so forth. Build up a library of resources that are both close and distant, and learn the options you have.

When you look to use ideas you find useful, it's best to borrow from distant sources; generally speaking, if you are writing a Dungeons & Dragons adventure, then swiping from other D&D adventures makes you a thief, whereas borrowing an element from board games or MMOs makes you smart. Borrowing from much more distant sources like theatre or history makes you a creative genius. Research the field, and then go far beyond that.

-- 'The Process of Creative Thought' from The Kobold Guide to Game Design by Wolfgang Bauer

This is not a new thought, but I thought it particularly well stated. I'm reading a lot on game design (both computer and tabletop) right now, and I'm tickled at how applicable most of the ideas are to non-game user experience work.

Of course, that shouldn't be a surprise -- the use (and mis-use) of "levels 'n grind" style game mechanics (among many other things) is pretty much a straight descent from Gygax and Arneson in 1974 to fantasy computer games to modern MMOs to the gameofication of software.Not sure what Gary would think of Foursquare, though ...

MMO subscription charts

I'm reading a few books on online gaming, starting with Edward Castronova's Synthetic Worlds. It's mostly about MMORPGs, or MMOs as we've thankfully started to call them.

I'm about halfway through the book, which was published in 2006, and it's startling how much has changed in a few years. As the book was written, World of Warcraft was just starting to take off -- and the current crop of lightweight social games wasn't even on the horizon.

Castronova spends some time talking about the number of folks spending their time in online worlds, and I wanted to know how those numbers looked now. So I headed over to MMOdata.net, which does a fine job of collecting those stats. (It's worth spending a little time with their MMO and Accuracy list, a nice bit of data collection transparency.)

All the following charts are from MMOdata as of August 3, 2010: the charts are regularly updated.

The first chart is total subscriptions for all MMOs tracked -- a pretty steady curve up, at least until the last 6 months or so.

The next tracks subscriber growth for the top MMOs (those with 1+ million subscribers):

Finally (and I find this the most interesting chart of all), the number of peak concurrent users for the largest shards. Most games control the number of peak users by adding more shards, and so aren't shown -- instead we see the two main worlds with no sharding. In other words, everyone logging on is in the same world at the same time.

Eve Online is an interesting example of slow, steady growth as a relatively minor game world.

Lessons from designing role-playing game adventures

I was reading James Maliszewski's interview of Paul Jacquays*, and came across this bit:

10. Are there any lessons you've learned from working in the computer game field that you think ought to be applied to tabletop RPG design?

Provide more than one solution to encounters, if only to be willing to accept the other solutions that your players devise.

Take into consideration your players' (not their characters') skills and ability to understand 3D space when creating or choosing adventures. Don't throw new players into complex 3D settings. Mapping and understanding one's position inside 3D space can be challenging even for skilled players. Start "flat" and work them up to spaces with more complicated vertical relationships.

Create spaces that could work in the real world. Walls have thickness. Large open interior spaces have to be supported by columns to be believable. As a fantasy illustrator, I learned to engage the viewer's suspension of disbelief by creating realistic, believable environments which would in turn lend their reality and believability to the fantasy elements found within. Designers need to do the same thing ... engage the players' suspension of disbelief just long enough to convince them that game situations are grounded in things that could happen.

Give your players "save spots" in your gaming sessions, natural breaks in the adventure where they can pull back, regroup, return to base, etc.

Finally, don't overwork the game's backstory. Less can be more, so write as little as you can to convey it. I emphasize this to the content designers on my own project teams. Your players will appreciate that you are creating plot and character links, but could probably care less about detailed ancestries, hidden motivations, or involved descriptions of locations and events that they will never encounter. They just want to hit things and move on. Don't make success in your game depend on reading multiple paragraphs of stilted description or dialogue.

I don't think it's too crazy a stretch to apply these lessons to design outside of a game context altogether.

*James Maliszewski is a somewhat-old-school RPG designer and author of the old-school gaming blog Grognardia. Paul Jacquays is a really-old-school game designer.