f13.net

Raph Gone Wild

It's late on Friday, the final day of the Austin Games Conference. Everyone is tired, hung over, or, most likely, both. And yet, much work remains to be done. A small corps of the 101st Fighting F13 platoon cornered a well-known game designer in an obscure, mostly-empty room tucked safely away from the receding tumult of the convention at large.


From left to right, the fine and exhausted gentlemen pictured above are Yoru (with money hat), Raph Koster (trying to kill us with his mind), and Koboshi (unshaven).

What follows is the mostly-raw transcript of an hour-long interview that pretty much jumps all over the place in terms of subject matter. Discussed are the emerging market dynamics of MMOs/virtual spaces, procedural and handcrafted content, middleware, NPCs, beer, and a wide host of other topics.

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Oh we did end up having Amy's Ice Cream in the airport, it was delish.

Why didn't you grill him on Star Wars?!  :evil:

Good read. I agree with a lot of Raph says about Habbo Hotel, MySpace, SL, etc, although I have a different analysis. At some point the games industry is a games industry, not a generic product industry. And most devs are in the game industry because they want to make games. If you don't like making games there are jobs with better hours, better pay, etc.

MySpace is pretty popular. So is soap. And ice cream. And football. That doesn't tell me anything. It would sound pretty strange to say "sure, WOW has a lot of subs but look at how many people watch football! WAY MORE!"

Why don't game devs pay attention to Myspace and Habbo Hotel? Because MySpace is lame and Habbo Hotel is super duper gay. That's really the explanation. I don't want to make the next MySpace or Habbo Hotel. (Well, maybe MySpace so I could cash out then make something better)

Most game devs are interested in creating something more than "stuff people use" or "websites people visit." If game devs wanted to just make stuff people use they would be MS devs writing the next version of Word.

Most people in life are not out to maximize popularity and profit. The fact that product A is more popular or profitable than the product B you make is often irrelevant, because you just don't want to make product A. Paying closer attention to things like Habbo Hotel might increase popularity and maybe profitablily - but in the end you are making fucking Habbo Hotel.

I think it really is that simple. Who here wants to create the next SMB3 or WOW or Counterstrike or Street Fighter, and who here wants to create the next Habbo Hotel? I couldn't even say "I work on Habbo Hotel" without cracking up.

MySpace with apartment graphics may be really popular, but its MySpace with apartment graphics.

Edit: Most game devs want to work on something they can be proud of, something they might play themselves. Just like most writers write stories they personally find interesting. If people are geniunely inspired to work on MySpace with apartment graphics then more power to them I guess, most most game devs (or programmers in general for that matter) aren't interested. And I don't see why they would be.

Wow, long read. Also, did Raph lose weight?

You're going to have to check his Glamour interview for that, dork.

How come I think an F13 desert island game would change from a coop style game to a horror-survival game in less than 2 days?

There can be only one?

Thank you, Margalis.  You crystalized what I was thinking but hadn't quite put into words.  Everytime Raph starts going on about some non-game shit that makes a meager profit by showing banner ads to eleven million thirteen-year olds, my eyes just glaze over.  Fuck CokeMusic and MySpace, I like games.  If you want to make this other shit, go tell someone who gives a damn.

That just means you're one of the dorky guys doomed to sit near the kitchen in the cafeteria rolling your funny shaped dice, WUA. :)

Margalis is right, of course. The industry just doesn't see it as "cool." That's the core issue.

But look -- I am a huge defender of games and their power, you know that. I am not saying ditch games. I am saying that we can invite more folks to sit at OUR table -- even the cheerleaders might like th funny dice if you explain it to them right.

Are you guys arguing over "presentation" basically, or is there something more here?

[edit] Everyone's a "gamer". That much I know. Cheerleaders, dweebs, old people, young people. Doesn't matter. So I guess I'm with Raph here. Not everything has to be "funny dice".

Or rather, the funny dice don't always have to look like funny dice.


But what if the "next Habbo Hotel" basically was CS or SF underneath, with only superficial changes that helped make them appeal to so called "non gamers"? Would it still crack you up?

I'm not sure why us "kids in the corner with the funny dice" should even care about inviting all the cool kids to our table. To go off of your analogy; Sure, if explained right, us D&D kids could get some of the cool kids to come play with us...but the kind of game they would want to play is not the kind of game we would want to play.

It's like the difference between "real gamers" and "Madden/Halotards."

Lol, "real gamer".

So much hate :)

There are no cool kids, and there are no D&D kids. There's just kids. Who all basically like the same things, albeit with superficial preferences.

It's kind of like Ice Cream.

Raph should drink Zombies. They're packed with rum and fruit, and they're called Zombies. If your business is video games, you can certainly order Zombies in a business meeting. Some recipes are pretty hard core. You'll earn the respect of your peers, and they won't snigger at you like they do when you order Piñas Colada.

Holy crap, that was all over the place. Good read. Chaotic, but good.


Gametap (http://www.gametap.com) really blew my mind when I found out about it. I wondered how the hell they could possibly get the rights to, like, every game EVAR. Then I found out...yep, Ted Turner.


I've seen NPCs do some pretty nifty things there. Nothing too awesome, but I've followed them around Stormwind quite a bit, and...yeah. "Pretty nifty" is a good way to put it.

See, I actually DO order White Russians, because I am secure in my masculinity!

another raph intimate moment I missed... :/

well, I know I saw at least 7 if not more people from Pirates of the Carribean (Disney) walking around.  And funny there's zero info about it.  And funny too that one woman in the Communities session rant who went on about Hollywood and Joss Whedon who said there should be no leaks with a game.  That "big companies" wouldn't work the same way.

another anecdote: in the digital distribution session Warren Spector and David Eddery were on one side and a publisher I forgot from where (got it taped) and the head of Gametap, which is now Turner. 

point?  big media is here and will be coming in more in the days to come I bet.

Thankfully, ignoring big media in gaming will be really frickin easy. It's not so easy in the movie and music fields.

Thing about Pirates is that it was playable at E3.  I played it.  You didn't hear a word about it because it looked pretty awful.  More cartoony than WoW.  If you really want a pirate game, it looks like Burning Sea is going to be your best bet.  Carribbean looks like kids' stuff.

Coming from the table top/LARP scene here, I think what Ralphs talking about is the same thing that happened with TT gaming.

Back in the 80's it was hard core gamers, then int he 90's you got white wolf and the 'story' style games, which attracted a differnt crowed, and you got a huge increase in game space (especially amongst women). Then later you had the social style larp explosion (differnt from boffer/lightningball larps) which tend to have gender parity or at least as close as you're likely to get. And with the larps is when I stated to see susie cheerleader, josie bookwrym and david powergamer all mingle together in a happy little pot, all because the gamespace sufficently changed to make it attractive to everyone.


god i hope that makes sense...

I pretty much agree. It's not dumbing down, it's finding elements that appeal to a larger base. Levels and plusses and hit points are just means to a Skinner-type end reward, and those means only work for the extreme geek crowd. You can really see that when you get off-norm accounts of mainstream games like WoW, of the 12 year old girl that's level 5 becuase she goes around and pets the bunnies or whatever.

I did find it interesting that more people are wanting the sort of theme park experience with the games; they prefer games on rails versus extreme open-ended games. I know I do; I prefer games that tell a story to games that have you make your own story, by dumping you in a virtual world half naked with a rusty dagger. It's why I hated oblivion. I wonder if it's perhaps an offshoot of the rise of passive entertaniment, especially TV, or of me getting older. I used to prefer the open ended content, now I simply can't be bothered.

I do sort of wonder if the market will eventually provide for the window dressing need; Computers will eventually provide for the UO-style ecology and AI; we're moving more towards greater simulation and sooner or later things will converge. You'll have a whole set of sub-companies leasing out their engines, just like FPS was 10 years ago.. It will come with it's own window dressing and designers will be able to focus the manipulation instead of the creation. Maybe.

Also, I'd love a survival-horror with you all. I'm with big.gulp, he's been stocking shit for years.

Science fiction fans may go all a-tingle now, because this thread had been "Brucedotted" so to speak.

http://blog.wired.com/sterling/index.blog?entry_id=1554440

Good stuff!  Thanks for the brain droppings Raph.

I'm one of those who believes it is possible to add worldy type elements to a direct game experience rather than approach it in the reverse manner for this reason.  Sandbox games tend to have to try and build in so many subsystsems that very often there is no core game elements done well leaving them feeling very unfinished.  To take the park example, yes, you can conceivable do 100's of different things in a public park space, BUT, for more of them you have to bring outside materials b/c the park doesn't supply them.  So even if you park actually has a baseball diamond on it, most dont' make bats, ball, gloves and gear available to anyone who wants to use it..or even a dodgeball for that matter.

However, if you go to a specific purpose environment, say a theme park, all you need bring is your self to enjoy the offerings which can be varied (rides, shows, food, arcades, midways, water stuff) and each offering can be done well.

Granted Im not a programmer, but if your underlying design is build with enough hooks into it, why couldn't you keep adding more pieces after the fact.  Heck if SWG could add an entire space battle game system after the fact, why couldn't WoW/EQ2 add a naval battle game, or dogfighting dragons?  Or adding linked to housing areas you can decorate (actually EQ2 already has this).

And the more specific game systems you link up, the more "worldy" the overall product begins to feel anyway.  Even ToonTown has this approach of "keep adding mini games" and they work synergistically.

Granted sometimes I want to just "play" be it with lego's or pen and paper for that matter, but probably more often I want something a little more specific than that.  Trying to be all things to all people just never seems to work out as well, no matter what the market.

Xilren

Well, look at your examples. Sure, you can add a hotel to Disneyland, but they can't let you stay on Main Street USA. You can add a waterpark alongside Disneyland, but you can't go boating around Nemo's sub (is that still there anyway?).

Say you wanted to add dogfighting dragons to EQ, something that we talked about monthly for as along as I can recall. None of EQ supports that sort of sky space. The size of zones relative to dragon speed are all wrong. So you can add a dragon arena, but you can't add dragon fights to all of EQ. It's all chopped up into small games, rather than being one world.

YES! Yes, thank you - that's what I took away from Raph's speech on Thursday, and it's something I very much agree with. In my experience, right now, Gamerdom is just beginning to get some broad social acceptance. I can go to a club - indeed, I did this on Friday, just after getting off the F13 'corporate jet' - and mention that I play and write about games. These days, people don't immediately burst into flames and flee. In fact, many of them can actually talk semi-coherantly (with the primary determining variant being amount of liquor already consumed) about upcoming and recently released games.

Further, look at the genre lifecycle (http://lostgarden.com/2005/05/game-genre-lifecycle-part-i.html) article. I don't agree with ALL of it, but I do believe in the basic concept behind it. A genre forms, accretes a fanbase from the gaming public, this fanbase slowly masters existing games until a Genre King creates the ultimate balance between accessibility and depth, and then from there on out, the genre turns inwards, focusing (generally!) on more complex mechanics to satisfy its existing fanbase. The focus turns inwards and it eventually withers off as longterm fans succumb to MOTS (More Of The Same) exhaustion, finally being (usually) cannibalized or (in rare cases) reborn into a new genre. (An example of a rebirth that seems to be occurring is the adventure game genre, infused with bits of FPSes, stealthers, and 3D platformers.)

I see no reason why this trend can't happen to the computer game industry as a whole. Further, more audience = more money = (hopefully) more games = (hopefully) more variety of stuff to play. This is good for everyone.


My reaction: Peanut butter jelly time! Peanut butter jelly time! :-D


From my experience building software, the 11th-hour features are often the worst, particularly if they come out of left field. When you're building a product, you look for things that are universal across your design and build your architecture around those. A very simple example (that I ran into this year) would be assuming a given data item must be unique, as it's been unique for the last some-odd years you've been dealing with it; suddenly, some new feature must get shoehorned in, and that data item is no longer unique. Now you need to deal with all sorts of special-casing for that feature, whereever that data item is used or manipulated.

I think the issue right now with worldy stuff is that it often requires more computationally-intensive systems because they have to be inherently more general-purpose. Let's say you have a game level and you want to have a man fall down a shaft. Before the advent of physics systems, you just put in an animation or piece of code that moved the man down the shaft. And you did that everywhere in your game that men had to fall down shafts. Not bad if it only happens a few times, and in similar ways, since you can reuse animations/code. But now you want men to fall down stairs and inclined planes. Well, shit, now you need a different animation for all the different sets of stairs and planes, or else the falling will look wrong.

Enter physics systems. They cost a lot of cycles to do well - hence the advent of physics coprocessors that we're starting to see - but the effect is awesome, both from the player and developer perspectives. The developer can now just say "This man weighs 150kg and is positioned here." and then the man will fall down whatever he gets 'pushed' onto. The developer just needs to tell the physics engine to push the man, how hard, and where (e.g. Stairwell Dismount). The man will fall realistically. And we can also have cows, cars and all sorts of other things fall down shafts, and none of it has to get special-case animations or code written for it.

There's also core assumptions, like Raph was saying. Look at his WoW freeform housing example; the basic question, "Where would you put it?!", points to a core assumption that WoW has - that its landscape is static. If you just let people plop down houses everywhere, mob spawns would get squeezed out in a short time since the zones are relatively small compared to the population per square meter, and the entire zones are taken up with PoIs, questing areas, and mob spawns (most of which are employed via quests). You would need to create whole open areas for housing alone, and these areas would have a very different feel to the varied and interesting 'main zones'.

The compromise solution being an AO-style instanced apartment, which violates the 'freeform, place-anywhere' constraint, but fits in better with the WoW gamespace. It's a gamier solution, and it fits better in the gamier game.

It's under renovations.  It's going to be a Finding Nemo themed ride.  Think it opens up next year.

But that's my whole point; a series of linked small games starts to become a world so long as they consistently fit together.  I don't really care if you simply log the player out of EQ into a entirely different game engine for the dragon fights; it becomes an extention of the EQ world.   Just b/c you cannot ride your dragon and strafe the folks in the Desert of Ro doesn't mean that cannot be part of the same overall worldspace.  Which is what the SWG addition of space did.  The original ground game and the space game are really two seperate games sure; BUT, they are both part of the SWG game experience.  You can choose to play one, the other or both, but if you're not a SWG subscriber you can't play either.

By exteneding your game to actually be a series of linked games, don't you end up with the same options a world offers in terms of things to do?

BTW, the freedom to sail around Cpt Nemo's sub sounds nice, but does what that ability mean add in any signifcant way to your Magic Kingdom gameworld?  Besides, if that was such a wanted feature, Disney could just have replicated nemo's sub in their water park with boats able to sail around it.  They do this all the time with feature characters anyway (i.e. mickey can be in Animal Kindgom, Epcot, and the Magic Kingdom all at the same time b/c they are discreet areas; but you wont see two Mickey's together in the same park to preserve the illusion that he's a unique being.

Xilren

You know what's awesome about that? He finds how game designers talk in real life fascinating, which underscores what I was saying in some other nearby thread (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=8147.msg221452#msg221452) WRT Ryan S's "nobody cares". QED.

When I want to play golf, I go to a golf course, not the middle of Yosemite. When I want to play the slots, I go to a casino, not my local library. There are general use areas and specific use areas. I think you have to design your general use areas at the beginning with most activities in mind, however you should be able to add specific use areas whenever you want them. So, maybe not allow dragon dogfighting above your little hamlets (beware the thatched roofs), but maybe in an arena type setting (al la Harry Potter Quidditch pitch).

The question I always go back to is -- is there a compelling revenue stream that comes along with all this added utility? Is adding houses in a new zone going to pay for itself? Maybe not in new subs, but perhaps in mitigating some of the attrition? I don't know... it is likely in my mind that adding a dragon dogfighting pitch is not a trivial matter, and that will have to be paid for somehow. And before you carp that Blizz (as a surrogate for game dev company x making this fictitious game with dogfighting dragons) is making stupid money, remember that each new addition needs to show a positive NPV on its own merit. No company is going to shave its profit margin for some feature that is not going to pay for itself.

What the hell do I care how many "cheerleaders" avail themselves of your game-like thing?  I'm a consumer, not an investor.

You don't care at all.

But this talk wasn't for the consumers, it was for the developers, publishers, and investors. :)

That would be exactly my position as well. To rephrase, you woul dhave to design a worldy game for your general use areas, one with the hooks. That permits the addition of specific use areas whenever.

I love Amy's.  We have one in Houston near where I live.

(And I am partial to the name.)

Sticking with the analogy of inviting more people to the cafeteria table - Let's say you have your group of dice rollers sitting in the corner playing d&d. A couple of the school's jocks wander by and notice the scantilly clad women on the covers of the books. They decide they want to see what it's all about. They don't go off to play their own game, no. Instead, they invite themselves in to the dice roller's game. Shortly after, they discover that the game doesn't actually have boobies, but it does offer them another avenue from which to push around the dice rollers.

So now the game company is happy, because there are a couple more customers out there to buy books. Too bad for the dice rollers, who are now stuck sharing their game with the same group of people they were trying to stay away from in real life.

Now everything I just said is completely silly when you look at it in real life, the dice rollers would just go play their own game somewhere else.. It's not so silly when you apply it to MMoGs though. It's already happened with UO and the griefers, any RP based shard ever made, any game that power gaming equates to accomplishment. It's no so easy to just up and find another game if we don't like the people we are sharing with.

As consumers, we are concerned about the companies trying to bring more and more people in to our niche. They're welcome to come, but we're going to have the mentality that it was our game first and we don't want them to ruin it for us.


*As an added thought, this is one reason I'm looking forward to seeing more smaller scale multiplayer games coming out. I'm hoping for continued growth in games along the lines of NWN, that let me pick and choose who I play with.

(http://www.fumettidicarta.it/OcchioCheUccide/ROCKY_HORROR/CREAT_FRANKENFURTER_SARANDON.jpg)

I didn't make him for you.

Now that's interesting. It really sheds light on something I experienced while dorking around Gametap. I was playing Pong and Pac-Man and Sonic the Hedgehog...and then when I started playing Myst III, the Gametap client minimized. I could see my desktop, and the Myst III client took over. Suddenly it wasn't as fun, because Myst III wasn't a part of Gametap. It was accessed through Gametap, but it wasn't really a part of it. The only thing that changed here is I could see my desktop; I saw behind the curtain. That's all. When I quit out of Myst III, I saw my desktop again, and then the Gametap client maximied...and I was back in my warm fuzzy Turner-induced happyfunland.

Half the time, when I enter an AO instance, I feel like I've actually entered the building. But sometimes I'll enter a high-tech skyscraper, and find myself in crystal caverns, and...immersion is broken again.

If I'm playing WoW, and I'm in the Warsong Gulch battleground, I don't think I'm anywhere near Kalimdor, much less the WoW world. It's a separate instance, floating out in space. Some dwarf in Ironforge teleported me there.

So yeah, you can have those dogfights over Ro...as long as the ground resembles Ro. You could stream in the data of what's happening there, and just display it on a flat virtual screen, wrapped around the terrain mesh. I'd go for that.

God this thread is full of useless analogies.

The only reason I want the cheerleader at my table is so I can stare at her tits. That's it.

The problem with these examples games is that they are all very simple, mostly suck, and are mostly aimed at 13-year-olds. That's not what I look for in games. At least SL has a relatively mature audience supposedly.

"Inviting everyone to the table" is another way of saying "aim for the lowest common denominator." That doesn't appeal to me at all. I don't want every game to be Tetris and Habbo Hotel and Nintendogs.

---

As far as designing a world up front, both of you are basically right. You at least need to have the core considerations in place. Maybe you don't have to code them all but you have to get a certain amount in and leave room for the rest. Player housing is actually a pretty easy one to add later if you instance it, but things like basic economy you can't just throw in later. It just depends on the feature and the scope. You couldn't go into WoW and change the monster spawning to work the way it did in UO for example, or add in player housing that took up real space.

Nobody is saying that every game has to be Tetris. But the converse is NO games being Tetris. You don't think EA would ever greenlight Tetris, do you?

You also seem to be saying that Tetris sucks. Do you really think that?

I disagree.

You're saying building a server platform that handles 70 million people isn't inspiring and certainly wouldn't be inspiring to game developers or any developer? Somehow because 'game' programmers have a Z variable and use random() to roll fake dice they are somehow super inspired to program on games only?

Use Shockwave 3D (which handles 3k people per server), take 'The Sims 2' + Second Life (house design + 3D crap whatever), allow a Myspace user to embed that on or through their existing 2D page. People that visit the page 'enter' the house/building with their avatard. Connect the housing grid via a Grand Theft Auto 3esq system (which would be more of a physics playground and NOT a travel mechanism). No grinds, no levels, no bullshit, no pvp. Impliment their music angle into it. Tack on the IMVU content creation/selling system. And somehow that wouldn't be inspiring to a game developer? I'm not buying it.

Myspace is mainstream, GTA is mainstream, The Sims is mainstream, Need for Speed (racing) is mainstream, Madden 2523 is mainstream. I don't use or play any of that shit but there are plenty of people using/playing/building it because for big companies mainstream is where the money is at.

I'm just really disappointed you've chosen to go this way, Raph.  I still play UO to this day.  And SWG... well... at least it tried to be something besides yet another Diku, and kind of succeeded for a few years.  Now that you're a free agent, I was hoping you'd end up concocting a sort of final summary of your previous designs, a big grandiose sandboxy RPG.  Minus the naive mistakes of UO and the SOE/LA fuckups of SWG.  I was hoping you'd take whatever it was you were trying to do with your first two games and finally get it right.

Instead you're extolling the virtues of a bunch of faggoty advertising-driven shit, sold by cartoon and cereal and soda vendors, and played by children.  Good luck with that, I won't be paying attention.  Nor will I weep when Pardo throws a half-empty Slurpee at you from the window of his solid-gold Lamborghini and screams "Habbo Hotel my ass, Holocron!  Bwahaha!"

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to kill titans in Despise.  I finally hit 7xGM for the first time ever.  I usually swap out skills and tinker around before reaching this point.

I'm a bit dissapointed too. I had this image of Raph as Fox Mulder, constantly dogged by corporate moguls who tried make his sandboxy vision more marketable, his attempts to reach his gaming nirvana thwarted. Turns out that perhaps he simply was the Smoking Man all along.

But we have Tetris. The system worked. We have The Sims, we have Nintendogs.

As far as Tetris sucking, I would never pay a dime for it. Is that a valid answer? Its great in the same way windows solitaire is great.


Your Sims 2 + SL sounds kind of cool. I'm pointing out that most devs want to make games that would appeal to themselves. That's the same reason video game women have big boobs. Most devs aren't interested in playing games that appeal to 11-year-olds. Some are. If that game has a lot of cool technology sure, I can see that. If the game appeals to people older than 11 then again, I can see that.

Habbo Hotel? That's not the game you are describing.

Personally I would work on something because the subject matter interested me, or the technology interested me. Habbo has neither. Tetris for that matter has neither. MySpace? Neither.

SL seems somewhat interesting to me, it appeals to my inner nerd. Making your own content, that's cool. It's creative. I'm not sure if SL is a great game but it might be fun to work on. Habbo? Never. CokeMusic? Give me a fucking break. Just the name makes me want to vomit.

Why don't devs pay more attention to Habbo Hotel and RuneScape? Because most devs don't play them and don't want to. It really is that simple.


What's wrong WUA, you don't want to play "Adventures of Flakey the Frosted Flake guest starring Tony the Tiger"? It's a free web-based game with revenue based on Olsen Twin clothing ads.

Divine.

If I was a developer, I'd want to design a cross between Gametap and MySpace. THAT would be the penultimate in gaming. Not WoW, not UO, not even SL or Habbo or whatever. You know how people on YouTube get their own profile where they host videos? Give those people game development tools. Holy crap, I get giddy every time I think of the madness.

UO is great fun, even at ten years old. I still play ATITD and WoW alike. Played 'em both today, in fact. The market is still there. People want worldy-games and gamey-games. But geez, preferences vary widely among players and devs alike. Not everyone has the same tastes.

Game devs build wackafoozles because that's what they know how to do. Internet people build web browsery community shit because that's what they know how to do. And brand marketing people make shit like CokeMusic.

There is limited crossover between 'gamedev' and 'internet people' old boy's clubs. And marketing people whore out their flash dev to anyone that will take their money.


Wasn't that what the the Xbox game studio thing was suppost to be? Instead it was some libraries for an IDE. What a joke.

He gets the Hunter S Thompson award for the "press hat" look.

Tetris does suck.  I'm okay with no games being Tetris.

WindupAthiest, Margalis, and Engels said everything I've been thinking and said it better.  I used to read every word written by Raph that I could find because of his design work on UO, the greatest game of all time.  Now he just makes me sad.

I guess what bothers me about this is the trend toward larger aggregation of companies, budgets and dev talent, and that a few houses are going to scoop up more or less all of the biggest talent.  If my only two choices are another iteration of [Warcraft- Everquest-Counterstrike and the like] or some goofy Myspace-portal-esque shit, I'll take the former, thanks.

Wow. Flashbacks Ahoi captian.

It's just like the late nineties/oaughts in table top.

the thing is either all the differnt pepole that arn't playing now will find a game/genre where everyone enhances the experince (optimum goal) OR will grow the market sufficently that you niche guys can be supported in luxuroy. because if there's a huge market developers and people looking for funding can say "well, we're just going to be niche. but 1% of a 20 billion dollar a year industry is still 200m a year..."

It's like the guys who wailed and gnashed teeth about white wolf. or magic. or any of the other new 'not really games'. Because the hard core guys were being margilinalized and niche-ified. which sucks, but is ok if the market can grow enough, because then you're niche, but your niche is bigger than it was back when you were main stream....

Interesting. There seem to be all these assumptions that I am going off to make ChatSpace3. I'm not. Whatver I make, there's going to be a game -- even one you'd call "a real game" -- involved. This talk was about predicting business trends -- and it wasn't about whether I liked them, it was about observing.

I happen to think that there's room for all sorts of games in that climate. Habbo and puzzle games are mammals in this view, but so are Eve and Runescape.

We got hold of some oversized sunglasses later on, took some pictures with them.  Though I don't have them, someone does.

With your acumen, the more you point out retarded business trends, the more you involuntarily perpetuate them. I can only draw the conclusion that you've somehow lost the will to fight for the game. Not to say I can blame ya, I too would be disheartened after the LA/SOE disaster.

That said, I think you might have too much time on your hands if you're coming up with market strategies for bloodless business men instead of putting your actual creative talents to good use. Will you be hired on right away as the lead dev by some top end company? Probably not, but I think you'd be happier even as second fiddle in a dev team than trying on this new cloak as internet gaming business consultant.

 

Raph needs to hook up with a competent project manager and make something awesome. Seriously - Raph + competent project management = gold.

As far as predicting trends goes, I agree that at some point predicting actually becomes encouraging. I've heard Raph mention Habbo Hotel more than everyone else in the world combined. I'd never even heard of CokeMusic before. Now I know about them and so do a bunch of moronic money-grubbers.

To me asking "what can we learn from Runescape and Habbo Hotel?" is like asking "what can we learn from Pokemon the Movie 4?" when you are Stanley Kubrick.
---

I enjoy this unholy alliance I've forged with WUA. We seem to agree on a lot of things. Twins separated at birth?

Which one is the evil one?

Heh, I am not doing consulting. The talk is the outgrowth of watching trends for the last few years at SOE, where I was in a position high enough to see all the business stuff flying about.

You should be hearing about what I am doing very soon.

What ever you do, don't get a job.  You've been looking so happy lately!  Being a lay-about seems to suit you.

Nintendo, however, would NOT be okay with that.


I think that's the big thing here. We've been given fun toys to play with, with UO and EQ and whatnot. Now all of our providers-of-fun seem to be looking at Gaia Online with yen-symbols in their eyes. We see Raph Koster playing Second Life. We hear Garriott say the biggest mistake of UO was the low monthly fee. (Yeah, I love the guy, but he's never gonna live that down.)

We look at this seemingly bleak future of gaming and wonder, "What about UO2?"

And they give us Runescape.

Why all the hate for simple things in this thread? Are people too cool for Tetris? Too mature for MySpace? I'm not saying either is digital jesus, but it seems naive to dismiss them out of hand. I wouldn't necessarily want to play 'MySpace the Game', but it doesn't mean designers shouldn't look for interesting design ideas that could be pulled into games. From what I've seen, while it may be the game that draws people into MMOs, it is the community that makes them stay. There certainly seem to be strong parallels between MMOs and MySpace when it comes to building community.


I take it back Tetris DS is digital jesus. I :heart:  push Tetris.

I really don't see any reason to bemoan Raph admiring Second Life. It has aspects that are pretty damn impressive, unfortunately it's a little too technical for the average person. If you took the flexibility of someting like Second Life an applied it to a game with well defined rules and goals, well you  might get a Sims Onine that doesn't suck.

It has issues - it's pure sandbox, player designed content is the only content, and that just won't appeal to the masses. The average masses want a game to tell them what they are supposed to do.

On the other hand, it has a working economy, because anything you want to put in to the game costs you a micropayment. You make those micro payments back buy selling to or charging other players. And of course it's real attraction is the built in ability to add content, but not just add - to also program it. It isn't quite the Tower of Babel in Snowcrash yet, but its the closest thing out there currently.

If you want to build a giant 3d tetris theme park in game you can (if you have enough real estate). Or, you can run around with a penis for a head, if thats really your thing. Thing is though, the game is niche enough that it doesn't attract the penis head crowd much.

That's the tricky part to me - at what point does your inovative game become too accessable? At what point do the Dread Lords and azzrapers show up? Or even worse, at what point do the azzrapers run in to Grandma looking to play hearts with people?

Why the sudden rush towards the mainstream anyway?

The video games market is more profitable than movie-making - why throw all that away to make badly-rended internet versions of chat lines with game&watch-level subgames bolted on the side?

Why not just innovate within what's making people money-hats at the moment?

I'm with you.  I notice that now when players talk about game features, they always throw around terms like 'return on investment' and 'profitability' and 'appealing to a wider audience'.  That makes sense if you're a marketer or investor, but like WindupAtheist said, I'm a consumer, not an investor.  As an ordinary player, these things mean fuck-all to me.  People use 'niche' like it's a dirty word and condemn an idea because it wouldn't appeal to six million people simultaneously or make the company a gazillion dollars.  Just because an idea is profitable in the short run doesn't mean it isn't lame.

I really could give a shit if six million other people like the game I'm playing.  If a game has 100,000 players, that's a shitload of people to me, a single player.  I'll never meet all 100,000 people, so that's more than enough of a community for me.  Now at this point, here comes the refrain of "A big dev house such as EA would consider that a failure, and it would cost more than it would return."  Maybe they shouldn't exist any more, then, and somebody smaller who can make that work should give it a try.  'Inviting more people to the table' is a hideous concept because it implies that we're going to change the nature of what we play to please these newcomers, who may or may not even be attracted to the half-ass concoction that is created to try to please everybody.  If I sit at the table to play the board game Risk, I'm there to play Risk, not Checkers or Hearts or Poker.  If I only have 2 other people and myself to play Risk, and I'd really like a 5-player game, then two other people are more than welcome to join our group at any time - to play RISK.  I would not welcome them to sit down, and tell us other people "You know what, let's play Poker instead."  I am here to play Risk, first and foremost, and the people with whom I play it are incidental and secondary, brought together by our common desire to play Risk. 

are these casual/web-MMO's really sustainable?  from Raph's talk all games are becoming consummable, which makes sense.  So wouldn't this crop of Web 2.0-like games be the first that are dismissed?  It's just hard to see something like Runescape as nothing more than a fad.  But then I see MySpace as a fad, since in about 4 years its members will either be graduating college or high school or middle school and may be on to the next thing.

I just wonder how many of these games are played at home.  Or in other words, how many of these games are sustained, private place play vs. at the library, in the cube, on the bus, whatever?  I can see people devoting hours to Tetris or Runescape or Minesweeper-- you can get immersed in anything.  But it feels like a lot of these games are just like DiceWars -- people are goofing off at places like work or school where they shouldn't be and filling it with a game instead of web browsing or IM.  And that doesn't allow for long-term subscriptions, but may allow for micro-payments or pay-and-play.  But it also doesn't easily allow for that game to be sustainable long-term.

The thing about MMO's as designers have said elswhere and Ubiq and Gordon Wallton both said independently at the AGC is that they "reward devotion (and not skill)".  People pay subscriptions partly as a way of rewarding themselves or putting a little more faith in a title or provider.  I just don't get how designers are going to balance that need for gamers' desire for dedication with designs that may be disposable but yet somehow still sustaining prolonged play.

No, it's not. Really. The videogames market isn't more PROFITABLE, it just makes more revenue than first-run Hollywood movies. The movies are probably making more profit, because they have about 5 or 6 different channels for revenue after the movie has been removed from first-run theater status. They can sell DVD's, pay-per-view, rental DVD's, broadcast rights to both pay channels like HBO as well as network and syndication broadcast rights, and that's not even counting merchandising like posters, t-shirts and other useless shit. Video games? Most get the first run shelf in retail, and that's it. The better selling ones get either expansions or reissue versions, if they sell really well they get sequels, and if really popular they might get collected editions and merchandising. But unfortunately, the DEVELOPERS get very little of all that money. The publisher and the retailer are the one cleaning up, while the creator of the game if lucky gets enough to make another game.

MMOG's can certainly up that profit potential, but at a huge risk of financial loss.

Until this upside down world of economics gets fixed by things like digital distritbution, the video game industry is fucked for all but the big fish publishers.

That pretty much describes my gaming nights growing up. "Hey guys I got Oriental Adventures, let's make a bunch of dragon-slaying NINJAS!" "No wait, the new Talisman expansion came out." "SHUT UP WE'RE PLAYING STAR WARS!"

(everybody gets their Star Wars characters, some people roll up new ones, then half an hour later)

"Holy crap I'm drunk! Let's go bash mailboxes!"

I had more fun with who I was playing with, rather than the game I was playing. Gaming to me was what I did with my friends. Sometimes we did other stuff, but usually we gamed. We were always expanding our gang of wild-n-crazy D&D nerds, but...I wouldn't want to play a game with people I didn't know, no matter how much I liked the game.

I'm up for it!  Let's meet at the Tastee Freeze!!

I totally agree with Raph on this one. It seems to me a lot of people in this thread are saying "Give me the game I want" but what Raph is saying is, "MONEY HATS... THIS SHIT IS MONEY HATS IF SOME ONE GETS IT RIGHT". We dont have to like it, but there is it, and thats what producers and publishers want.
Did you know the two guys who invented myspace sold it for 56 million. Think how mucu money could be made if you could get all the people on myspace to pay $5 a month.

Lest we forget, in the "Age of the Dinosaurs" talk Raph also talked about the viability of niche titles.  One way to make a money hat is to make one big something that appeals to the lowest common denominator; another way is to get lots of little specialized somethings and gather them all together so that there's something there for everyone.  He brought up the example of Netflix aggregating a bunch of "niche" DVDs that only get rented once a month each, but when summed together make more money than you'd get by just stocking blockbusters.

Those cool innovative games that game developers want to make and that we want to play?  Those are the little somethings, like the Netflix DVDs that nobody else wants to rent.  There's plenty of room for them too.

Im not saying there is no room for them, or that they shouldnt be made. Im just pointing out to the people yelling at Raph that there is a HUGE amount of money to be made for the person who gets the social network/game done right.

I was aiming that more at the folks who are concerned that Raph wants to dilute our pure gaming experience with Myspace features.  His recommendation to pursue lots of niche-driven targets (http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/agc2006/Slide49.JPG) is in fact the exact opposite of that.  Diversification is different from dilution.  Having the SOE Station Pass is not the same as putting wookie hairdressers in Planetside.

The problem with the NetFlix analogy is without the major hits NetFlix would suck. The fact that NetFlix has lots of other stuff is a nice differentatior. But if you pit NetFlix without blockbusters against other similar services it would lose badly.

NetFlix has basically everything Blockbuster has plus more. It's not a collection of niche stuff. It's a collection of hit along with a collection of niche stuff.

The more diversity a service like Netflix has, the better it does, so naturally having blockbusters AND niche titles is better than just having niche titles.  Just like it's better than having just blockbusters.  Or having just one blockbuster. 

A WoW subscription is a little bit like a version of Netflix that only has one movie to pick from at any given time.  One REALLY POPULAR movie.

If we're going to play this analogy, Netflix is like one of those games where you only get a certain number of action points to spend in a given period.

And even then everyone's missing the main attractions of Netflix in this Analogy - that you don't have to remember to return the movies and it's cheaper than Blockbuster/ Hollywood Video/ Local Store even if you only get one movie a week.  It's the same way they're missing the point of MySpace - to get laid and attention whore.

Yeah, millions and millions of people use the interweb. Yeah there's money to be made there.  I don't think it's in games, though, so why are games designers busting a nut about it?  They learned ow to make games, not social spaces.. they're running a restaurant and trying to figure out why everyone's over buying pop at the gas station.  And holy shit, have you seen the cash that gas station pulls in!!?

I think people are missing the whole chicken and egg thing: Games become social spaces not because they were designed to be social spaces, but because the game's popularity makes the game a social space. The same thing can be said of MySpace; its a popular social space because of its design components, some of which facilitate social networking, but on the whole are popular because of ease of use and simple design.

That said, game designers that forget the social interface of their creations are morons of the highest order. A game with a poor social interface, say, a poorly designed chat-box, will naturally hamper the game's ability to become a social space.

Maybe you should concentrate on your music.  Your Games Suck.

Oh My God!  Nearly every single poster in this board has said something truly inspired and intelligent at some point… but not here.  Not a one of you has understood the simple concept behind all of this,

You need money to make games.

Let me dumb this down for you and go back to an earlier analogy.  Many of you have been suffering under the delusion that you are nerds, at the nerd table, playing your nerdy game, you've all slipped back into your high school personas, understandable.  But here's the real analogy: Raff is the principal of a school with a wonderful athletics program so good in fact the school makes good money off the sale of tickets to its games.  Of course to make sure that more people could get in and those that don't pay are kept out the principal authorized the construction of a stadium for the football, soccer, and baseball teams.  This cost a lot of money, and after it was done it brought in even more money.  All this made the Board of Directors very happy and of course it made jocks very happy.  But why did principal Raph do it, sell out his school?  Raff realized as principal he was neglecting the other students.  The drama club didn't have a stage to act on, the only musical program was the marching band, and despite the fact that there was a science club, art club, and a Boy Scout troop, none of the members would admit to being part of them.  Raph was getting the money together so that he could build a stage for the drama club, a music program that included of classical and modern instruction, he wanted to harness the abilities of the truly gifted students in the science club by giving them lab time, equipment, and supervision, provide the artistic with the ability and the means to express themselves, and he was trying to put together enough money to send the Boy Scout troop to an actual forest where they could actually explore.

After reading that I want to get one thing clear, the reason why everyone of you was pissed off and dead set against him is because he's not trying to work for you. In fact he's working against you. Because you are the jocks.  You're the idiots who run around and pick on everyone else who comes anywhere near you.  You are the destroyer of artistic expression which does not serve to increase your egos.  You are given everything, time, money, equipment, attention, and you scream like children for more!

Raph is talking about market trends because he needs to pay to make your games, and as anyone here knows full well, our community is far too judgmental to pay upfront for something before it has been put out, and so the money does not come from us.  (Feel free to prove me wrong by forming a couple investment groups for gamers, I would welcome it)  So he must get money from those who have it.  Fortunately, the people who have it are easily lead creatures.  These walking penises believe that money is God, they will follow it, wherever it goes.  They will even follow when it points them towards games, a field they have absolutely no experience in.  So what has Raph been doing recently, he's been learning to heard these beasts, corral them into pens, to butcher them, so that you may eat.

But let's not be too easy on Raph has he has underestimated its prey, and so to have some on this board.  Myspace is not a model on which to follow economically, Myspace is an emergent social phenomena.  If you want Myspace in your game you're going to have to figure out how it happened, which is a much more complicated task than figuring out how to make a web page where people can put their pictures up.  Don't believe just because you captured the beast that you've broken it, many a developer will get tossed aside, broken, trying to tame that beast.

I'm largely in agreement with koboshi, though I couldn't put it to words earlier.  Frankly, the game industry is in the business of making money.  Though we really like the idea of it being "just for us", we're not exactly the largest market in the world.  I can't blame them for talking about trying to attract more people.  Fuck, if they lose every single one of us and bring in the entire Sims market, they're in better shape than they are now.

Raph is talking about a bunch of shit we don't care about.  It's precisely as if he came in here and told us he realized the real money was in toilet seat manufacturing.  Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.  I don't care either way.

My theory is that its a diversionary tactic. If he can get a bunch of games developers who attended AGC to build virtual worlds for MySpace onanism, he'll have the gaming virtual world market to himself. He's a cunning man.

The real way to think of it is that I am sick of working on giant team big-budget extravaganzas. :)

So you've given up the idea of making a GOOD virtual world then?

It's odd that for people who claim to like games, they seem to hate game developers so much.  I don't understand why you post here, Raph, but good luck with whatever it is you're up to.

Who here hates game developers?  :| I'm not seeing it.  I'm seeing people being somewhat rude and kinda douchey, but that's it.

It woulden't be F13 if it wasen't.

Posting in a completely degenerated thread.

Nor do I.  I don't see anyone dragging this down to a personal level.  As to being rude :  We paid for these games.  It's the tone of dissatisfied customers you are hearing. 

I love game developers.  Sometimes I feed them breadcrumbs at the park.   :heart:

Not For You (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/24)

The douchey answer is that he is so sick of looking at bar graphs that look like this:


number of people who have subscribed to...
WoW xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Lin     xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
EQ     xxxxx
UO     xx
SWG  KEKE LOLZ


that he'll do anything he can to justify a chart like this:


# of people who have ever...

masturbated         xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
sent an email        xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
eaten McDonalds   xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
watched the NFL   xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Been to Qatar        xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
played WoW          xx
played Lineage       x
played EQ              x
played UO              x
played SWG           kekelolz

But that would be super-douchey.

Seems a bit mean spirited, but perhaps accurate. All the things Raph seems to think are marketable items have one thing in common; they are not games. They may be features within a designed game, but not games in and of themselves. It just won't fly. I hope you don't think the new chart will look like this:

played SWG                                   x
played wow                                   xxx
watched youtube                           xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
played swg with embedded Youtube  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Runescape?

WOW is a much bigger success than Runescape.

There is a fundamental problem in trying to figure out how to make a lot of money from things when their main selling point is that they are free or very low cost.

A lot of people play Window's Solitaire. It may be the most popular game in the world. That doesn't mean you can charge $15 a month for it and start raking in money.

Well, yes, you can.

Just up the price of Windows by $15.

That would be that content aggregation thing at work.  You may not be able to sell Solitaire all by itself (at least not for $15 - I suspect that if you made a marginally better Solitaire, charged $5 for it, and got a good distribution channel you'd actually do pretty well relative to the cost of development), but it does very nicely when bundled with a bunch of other stuff.  Like all the various crap that comes with Windows, each bit of which does in fact drive up the price of the OS.

Yes, Indeed.  Which was really my point - Margalis used a very bad example.  Solitaire is not free by any manner of means.

However, what is generally overlooked is that one of the most basic positives of 'Things that are free or low cost' is that they have the distribution channel built in :  People Love Free Shit.

So finding ways to make money off of that is much easier than if you had to overcome an initial cost.

After all, that's pretty much how advertising space gets sold, isn't it ?

So it's easy to make money off Windows Solitaire :  You strike a deal with Marlboro to have every card stamped at the back with a 'Smoke My Cancer Sticks' logo.


The REAL trick is to get people to start paying for something that they used to get free - and even then, there's been successful models in the past, particularly in the gaming world.  Doom and Counterstrike leap straight to mind here.