/ Cory Doctorow / 6:25 pm Tue Mar 24, 2009

Real Money Trading game design, my notes from today's Game Developers' Conference

One of the most interesting -- if sometimes creepy -- talks that I sat in on today at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco was "Applied Real Money Trade Design," with Eric Bethke of GoPets (a kid-oriented virtual world with a active market for buying and selling virtual goods) and Andy Schneider of Live Gamer (which runs the marketplace in GoPets). I took a bunch of notes -- this is thought-provoking and odd stuff that crosses the boundaries of fairness, economics, play and work.
Balancing methods: How can you screw up?

* You can't get this right a priori

   * You need to iterate

* Free to play isn't a business model, it's a name for thousands of business models

* Things that are defensive in nature can be charged for, and the time-rich skilled players won't resent lamers having more health or a shorter corpse-run, because they'll still kill 'em

   * But give the lamers big weapons and it amounts to an "I win" item -- instead, sell things like awesome looking weapons <

* Rental is awesome -- an item that's too powerful disappears from the game when the rental period expires

* Limited edition items -- they're scarce, you unbalance the game for 2-3% of the players

   * If it's really bad, you can buy them back

  * But it's a bad habit to get your users into

* Every couple months, come up with a whole new roster of items that are 10% more powerful than all the previous items; the inflation washes away all your past sins and your players are happy to spend all their time grinding those new items

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  2. I don’t know why paying real money for a predetermined item in a video game seems so impossibly lame to me. There’s just a definite no go zone there.

    But for some reason, I wouldn’t have such a problem with some intermediate system. For example, players pay a monthly fee to play and then accumulate exp and in game money, which could translate into cash or free game play or something. That’s not so bad. Or the most loved player characters get credit or money or uberquests somehow, also not so bad.

    But in the discussion, there seemed to be a mercenary flavour that misses something. Items just ‘look awesome’ or are 10% more powerful. There’s no personality there. There’s no: Kazok can make you armour that will be extremely durable, but will be plus five in weight and smell of offal.

  3. Video games are successful to the extent that they make me forget that I’m just engaging in a repetitive task – and paying money – to increment a score counter somewhere. Call it the equivalent of suspension of disbelief.

    The best games dispense with the score entirely, and offer rewards in the form of intellectual satisfaction over puzzles solved, interaction with friends, and occasionally actual physical activity. (ie. DDR, a lot of Wii games, drumming in Rock Band.)

    I still play some score-based games from time to time if they’re pretty, but they have to be exceptionally pretty, and they still have a limited play life. Meanwhile, the Rock Band disk hasn’t left my Xbox for more than a week since it was released. Spending more and more effort balancing scoring metrics is really missing the future of gaming.

  4. Inflation and entropy are inversely proportional to each other, and also both inversely proportional to fun. There seems to be no solution that isn’t a delicate balancing act.

  5. Have to disagree about the defensive items.
    Extra health on player A is like relative damage to player B
    That’s why you kill the healers first.

    Shorter corpse runs maybe. God knows I need ’em.

  6. “Every couple months, come up with a whole new roster of items that are 10% more powerful than all the previous items; the inflation washes away all your past sins and your players are happy to spend all their time grinding those new items”

    Yeah, not so much. Well, for awhile this will work. Eventually, you burn out your long-term players. Which is fine, if you don’t expect to keep most players for more than, say, a year, but if you’re looking for long-term retention, you’re going to have to think a little harder than that.

  7. I believe World of Warcraft takes that strategy (increasing gear strength every couple of months or so), and they seem to have reasonably good retention, at least judging by the number of people I know who have been ‘playing’ (i.e., push button, get bigger sword) for years.

    The thing that gets me about paying for advancement in games is that I think games ought to be fun, or entertaining or artistic or ‘something,’ besides simply a magic money generator. When I was a kid, I always thought video game studios would be a lot of fun to work for because, you know, games are fun and that logic seems perfectly acceptable for an eight year-old, but every time you hear anything from the movers and shakers it’s just a bunch of suits talking about ‘exploiting brands.’

    It isn’t like I’m some kind of dirty Communist who hates the idea of selling something, but it’s depressing when every single situation boils down to ‘how can I get the most money from everyone?’ I think it takes the fun out of things very quickly when you realize your entertaining game is just digital camouflage from behind which a suited businessperson is making a grab at your wallet.

  8. So how should I spend my gaming time if I want an Emo Roe? Grind it out meatfarming on the Icy Peak, or wheel and deal in /c trade?

  10. I completely sympathize with Mr. Doctorow’s horror at the creepiness of this. Or I should say creepy mercenary soul-destroying grossness of this. Although I am a self-confessed game addict (and I could probably be compelled by my OCD to play a game that consisted of nothing other than incrementing a numeral display, or better yet, the anciently, magnificently stupid Internet applet “Virtual Stapler”), I’m also discerning enough to identify good game design ideas from bad ones.

    At the same time that MMO designers explore these increasingly sophisticated psychosocial techniques for separating rubes from their cash, the breadth and richness of game design in general (and tabletop roleplaying game design specifically) has experienced an incredible intellectual renaissance over the past decade.

    It’s hard to summarize, but mostly this renaissance has been driven by the principles that: (1) the players don’t need a referee to provide a framework for play; (2) the players create their own content; (3) every player is the center of the action; (4) every player’s actions change the game world; (5) the characters in the game do not have to be mapped to the players in a 1-to-1 ratio, and do not have to be static over time; (6) the characters in the game don’t have to be defined by statistics or accumulate some resource to “advance” from a position of relative weakness to a position of relative strength – every character can be an absolutely mighty force within the narrative from the moment the game begins. What makes the game compelling is the exploration of catharsis through narrative.

    But almost none of that intellectual richness has penetrated the realm of MMOs.

    The suits patting each other on the back for their multivariate cost/reward structures and cynically patronizing limited edition items are painting themselves into a corner. Whether in a month or a year (or maybe a few decades, for extremely well-capitalized and profitable games), boredom will eventually overwhelm the population of available customers. The MMO described above is like an aesthetic pyramid scheme.

    At each level of play, the built-in compulsion to see what’s at the next level of play is encouraged by the promise of increasingly compelling aesthetic content. But for all sorts of business reasons, the efficient production of aesthetic content (music, graphics, rules-balance testing, story content) eventually settles down to a fixed rate. Every month, the game developers have just enough money and programming talent to haul out 3 new adversaries, or 5 new spells, or possibly (with a great burst of effort) an inventory of new stuff in an expensive big add-on or download.

    Meanwhile, the population of MMO players experience an exponentially growing need for aesthetic stimulation. The experienced players are eventually so jaded that 5 new spells or 10 new quests or 20 new monsters look functionally equivalent to the last set of new goodies, and the set of cool items before that. A player eventually manages to kill the Golden Automaton, and finally sees a “Uushuel’s Blade of the Necromancer” spawn. The sword is shiny, it can cast a bolt of scintillating crystalline shards, it can bind undead …, blah blah blah. The sword has no organic narrative; it has no larger part in the evolution of the world it is found in.

    It’s just a fashion accessory made out of pixels.

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