Raph’s Happy Metaplace (f13 interview)

F13: Lum recently commented on his blog, with a link to a Jonathan Blow interview, that subscription-based revenue models encourage socially-irresponsible game design. Lum states that subscriptions encourage designers to add time-sinks – what do you think of that? Does a non-subscription business model encourage more active play?

Raph: Both Lum and Jon are friends, but I think the issue is somewhat complicated, so I am not going to really agree fully. There are plenty of subscription services of all sorts that we don’t find full of timesinks — for example, cellphones actually encourage people to be somewhat careful with their minutes, or to work to maximize quota at any rate.

I think the real question they are getting at is whether or not there are design patterns here that are driven more by commerce than by what is good design for the user. In the case of subscriptions, the intent is longevity of the subscriber, not the intensity of their play. But we’ve also found that regardless of business model, most MMORPGs whether free or microtransaction-based or whatever, still tend to have similar weekly engagement numbers.

In other words: if you love the game and make it your hobby, you still tend to play 15-20 hours a week. And if you play less than that, it’s often a sign that you are losing interest or unlikely to stick. Logging in is the single biggest predictor of retaining a user.

The flip side is that there is little doubt that there are design things that you can do that bluntly put, do not make the lives of your players better but instead make it worse.

In the case of subscriptions, setting crazy long term goals for users isn’t necessarily the healthiest thing for them. I tend to believe that
goals users set for themselves are better.

F13: What do you make of Blow’s assertion that “modern game design is actually unethical”?

Raph: Jon’s take on the underlying mechanics of fun, from a chemical point of view, isn’t very different from mine. I think that Dan Cook probably said it most succinctly, that “game designers are hijacking the learning systems of the brain.” But perhaps we might tweak that to “the REWARD systems” of the brain.

Lots of other things accomplish this, sometimes for good and sometimes for evil. A lot of work goes into devices and designs built to encourage gambling, for example, and if you read up on the subject, you quickly find that there’s something deeply manipulative about it.

On the other hand, we are also tapping into that when we give someone a gold star for doing well in grade school, and this is usually used for a positive purpose.

So I think what Jon wants is for us to work towards positive purposes, and these purposes aren’t always fun, but also provocation, mental challenges, communicating ideas beyond just little spikes of pleasure. And I completely agree with that notion. Games have great power to teach all sorts of things beyond what they tend to now.

Is it unethical to not use a medium to its fullest potential? No, I don’t think so. But it is to use it for purposes that you know are pernicious. And I think that maybe a lot of the industry’s challenge on this front is figuring out whether they know what is good for players and what is bad.

F13: What would a socially-responsible game, in your mind, look like?

Raph: I think we have many many examples. Games as a form of speech advocating points of view have existed forever. There are implicit political, philosophical, and rhetorical arguments in games such as M.U.L.E., Seven Cities of Gold, Ultima IV, Civilization, SimCity, MUD, Ultima Online, Pikmin… the list goes on and on.

F13: If you look at sites like Terra Nova, you see a lot of fairly off-the-wall, ivory-tower stuff…

Raph: What, you mean a question like “what would a socially-responsible game, in your mind, look like?” isn’t Ivory Tower?

F13: Well, for example, Ted Castronova’s research results on virtual worlds indicating that people actually do act in an economically-rational manner in virtual environments. Have you seen anyone applying all this basic research in the field?

Raph: Certainly. I know that at SOE we directly applied a lot of the stuff that we saw coming out of PARC, for example, and I helped kick off the effort to get EQ2 data into the hands of researchers, because we saw it as a mutually beneficial effort — and SOE has continued to do an amazing job of supporting that project. The results of that have started to show up now.

Now, I am not privy to everything that folks running games like WAR or WOW do these days, but I’d be very surprised if deeper analysis wasn’t part of operations. If it isn’t, it should be.

It can seem ivory-towerish to ask these complicated or analytical questions, but in the end, complicated and perhaps even pointless
inquiry eventually turns into stuff of incredible utility that positively impacts all players. So I have always been a huge advocate of close ties with academia, because it eventually leads to better stuff for everyone.

F13: In what ways?

Raph: Nothing I can talk about yet, but we intend to be as engaged as we can afford to be on that front.

F13: Okay, taking a different tack, what are some of the cool things you’ve seen from your testing crowd on Metaplace?

Raph: The unexpected is the stuff that I enjoy the most. I don’t know if you saw our recent spotlight, but I never expected to be talking about a “Scandinavian folk music RPG.” But how cool is it that something like that exists? I love it.

There’s the weird 9/11 protest world, there’s the many folks working to make RPGs of various sorts, there’s the housewife who just uses it as an ever-growing dollhouse.

F13: What have you learned from watching people use – or abuse! -the Metaplace toolset?

Raph: That we needed a different toolset! Heh. I guess, we learned that we take so many things for granted, as developers, a level of knowledge that many people, though no fault of their own, simply don’t have. The word “sprite” is tech jargon. There are so many things that even as gamers, we take for granted as terms and as knowledge, and when you are trying to empower just about anyone to make a world of their own, you have to really work hard to approach things as more of a blank slate.

Like, click to move – we thought it was easier. Then we get so many folks who don’t even know what that is.

The Sims has served as a big inspiration here, because obviously they did manage to provide a creative canvas for people with very easy tools. We ramp much higher, in the end, all the way up through scripting behaviors, web integration, all that, but we do try very hard to have the initial experience as approachable. And that has meant literally throwing away toolsets. I think we have rebooted the tools path at least four times, in our quest to get it right. And at every step, we see better stuff being built.

F13: Does Google Lively scare you at all, with respect to Metaplace?

Raph: Lively is definitely an interesting product, and of course you can never discount Google. But I think we’re aiming at different things. I know that at AGDC they announced that people could make interactive content using Gadgets… but it seems to me that in terms of user created content, Lively aims higher up the spectrum than we do. We want ordinary people to participate in that creative process, that’s a big part of the point to our minds.

Of course, that’s also why we chose Flash as the client — it’s everywhere and everyone has it, and there’s no download or install or whatever. It does mean that we are focused on 2d, but we see that as part and parcel of enabling anyone to make content. 3d is just… hard. We’ll do it eventually, but putting up that barrier as the first step to be a contributor seemed like too much.

F13: How do your products differ?

Raph: There’s much more of a general network feel to Metaplace, I think. The metastream, for example, which is a global activity stream a lot like Twitter or status updates on Facebook, gets used a lot. The network-wide badges system, the social networking features. All that makes a big difference in how you interact with the system.

But I think the biggest thing is that Metaplace is built from the get go for ordinary individuals and communities to build interactive worlds, and put them anywhere.

F13: For the last two years, we’ve talked about how non-traditional companies are coming into the gaming space and eating everyone’s lunches. What kinds of impacts have you seen this have on the industry in that time frame? Has this sort of encroachment brought anything to the traditional gamer space?

Raph: I think it has. I am unsure that features like the various web-enabled things in LOTRO would be there without the increasing flow of ideas from the web world. And it’s clear, I think, that titles like Habbo, Toontown, and Runescape have influenced the way publishers approach titles like the Cartoon Network MMO and SOE’s FreeRealms, which may be more mainstream but are still aimed at gamers in a way that some of the web worlds – Millsberry, Barbie, WeeWorld – are not.

We’ve also seen things like EA’s attempts to become much more of a general consumer entertainment company, with stuff like Sims Carnival and Sims on Stage, and their purchase of Shawn Fanning’s Rupture social network for gamers. They’re not the only traditional publisher thinking along these lines either.

I still think that in the end, though, the web world, the media companies, the cereal brands, all those guys, are learning faster than the game guys are. I mean, when Big Fish, which got going as a casual games portal, can raise over $80 million, you have to think it’s to get into publishing in some fashion.

In the end, I think that collectively, we need to understand that these segments are becoming part of one industry.

F13: We’ve had two big-budget, big-name Western MMOs launch in the last year, and we’ve got another one just around the corner. However, so far, we’ve seen them sticking within more traditional realms of success rather than the stratospheric heights of That Game. What’s happening here? Is the market actually growing?

Raph: It’s growing great guns. Just not primarily in the demographics you are looking at. Have you seen the McDonald’s world? Personally, I think it has a fair chance of being bigger than WoW – they have talked about putting login codes in every Happy Meal.

Worldwide, when I first went out there to try to raise money, the best estimate out there of the worldwide population in virtual worlds was around 35 million, which was the population of Canada. And now it’s more like 135 million, more like Russia. So there has been tons of growth.