I just heard this talk at the MMOGfest academic mini-conference last week – apparently, it’s mostly the same as the talk he gave at the independent MMO conference earlier this year, but I think a lot of people didn’t manage to go to that one, so it seems worth reporting here.
Like all the other conference-talk writeups, any errors and ommissions are my fault, and my personal comments appear in square brackets throughout.
Summary
As noted in his Guardian article, “We’ve won”: games are here to stay. In the MMO space – despite all the threats and challenges – it looks like MMOs will continue to innovate and expand, and become better and better. A good, upbeat, keynote talk.
The future of MMOs … if you’ve just stepped out of a law conference
Applying the laws wrongly
- games and non-games have different legal sets: you’re allowed to beat the living daylights out of someone in a boxing ring
- possible outcome: VWs get no special treatment
- current signs: SL EULA being struck down in court
[too many people try to extrapolate blindly from “real world” laws into vw/online/games (which have few or no laws of their own … yet). But I think we have to be careful not to mix that up with the specifics of things like the SL case, which *even with separate laws* probably would go against Linden. Laws generally reflect the prevailing culture (according to the lawyers), and in the prevailing culture Linden seemed to be acting unfairly]
Money laundering
- [insert description of normal money laundering here]
- [my only question is why govts haven’t gone AWOL about this > 5 years ago?]
Income tax
- – in-game assets are valuisable => legally, they come under the laws of income tax
Patents cost a pittance to file, but .. It costs the blood of 12 freshly-slain virgins to get a patent revoked [yes, he actually said this :)]
The future of MMOs … if you’ve just stepped out of a business OR education conference
This misfits: the MMO developers got left behind by the rest of the world
Too much reality being applied into MMOs destroys the fantasy aspect
- advertising real-world products in MMOs intrudes the real world into the virtual world, blurring the boundary of the alternate reality
- micro-payments allow real-world status (wealth) to shape virtual world status (economy; dominance of best character/weapons/etc) [that’s simply illogical: it’s the kind of thing that Economists present as infallible logical reasoning (Richard didn’t, I’m just saying that other people do) and yet it has nothing logical or inevitable about it – it’s simply a guess of an idea of a thing that might happen with a potential explanation for why that MIGHT happen which even so may not be the real underlying reason it did happen. i.e. it’s nothing more than a guess and a groundless theory until/unless you add something – anything – that makes it more solid than that.]
- games were used by non-gamer educators as education tools, undermining the idea that a game should be “fun”
- educators want to use MMOs to paper over the cracks in the existing education system [there is a third way here: there are games being made that are exceptional teaching tools. Strangely, very few people are talking about this – I suspect it’s because the smart money is already quietly investing in it]
- in each case, MMOs are never regarded as being worthwhile in their own right, they’re only being seen as tools to achieve various unrelated things
At one conference I went to last year, some corporates literally couldn’t see any distinction between Facebook and Second Life. [this clearly annoys/depresses him – I’d be interested to know in what WAY they saw them as identical: were they just exceptionally ignorant and had no idea what either is actually like? or were they saying that, treated as a black box within wider processes / business models, the two are effectively indistinguishable? Or … those two templates, done appropriately, would be effectively indistinguishable [I think that part is often true]]
The future of MMOs … if you’ve just come out of a game-developers conference
The good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Clint Eastwood won because he had the best weapon
MMOs are inevitable
- in pure numbers terms, it’s no longer possible for govts and business to overcome / restrain / divert future MMO development: too many people already play the current variants, and any accidental poisoning of the concept, or attempt to shoehorn or co-opt for other uses, will simply get left behind and fade away into insignificance
- MMO devkits and low-cost art/animation assets open up virtual world creation [there are several companies that could launch this now or in the near futurebut haven’t / aren’t, and IMHO really should]
- most people cannot do IRL the things they do in MMOs, so MMOs have no alternative, unlike people like Richard Garriott who can afford to go into space like their Dad.
[shows a slide he put up at the very start, a photo of Blondie with lots of the Muppets]
My opinion? I already told you, subtly: the name of Clint’s character in Good, Bad, Ugly was Blondie.
MMOs will win because all that’s standing in the way is a bunch of muppets
Q: Why do you see Educators as being so negative?
Computer games in general are good at teaching two things: facts, and higher-order problem-solving skills
All the education money goes on something somewhere in-between, which is neither one nor the other.
Can you teach people to integrate using games? Well, sort of, but you can do that more effectively in other ways.
[Ha! I disagree completely. But … it’s hard, really hard, because practically all the good game design has ignored teaching to date, so we have almost no examples and almost no learning / knowledge to start from :( ]
Games abstract out details of things to improve gameplay, but that means they often teach incompletely, e.g. pirates games teach a lot about the economy of the carribean, but completely miss out the slave trade, despite that being an essential part of the economy, the history, etc.
Q: do you see a potential for developing a casual MMO?
Yes. Teenage boys are all playing Runescape, but the girls are largely unserviced as a market.
Many parents can happily play an MMO internsively for 2-3 hour sessions, IFF they can be interrupted unexpectedly for 5-10 minutes at a time. e.g. because a child needs some help with something. MMOs currently don’t allow them to do this – if you drop out AFK for a few mins, the raid fails.
Many retired people play poker and canasta online not because they like those games but because those are the only games that fit within their real-world requirements for commitment etc plus socialisation.
Q: do you play WoW?
I’m a designer, so I don’t get fun from playing them.
I get to see some wonderful design things, but I don’t need to play intensively to do that.
In the past, people used to interpret this as “you don’t REALLY know, do you? You just think you understand”. So, just for those people I got three characters up to level 70.
I’ll have to refresh my credentials when WotLK comes out, but I can say that nearly everything I learnt from WoW I learned by the time I reached level 10 – and the rest by level 20.
[I asked him afterwards “what about raiding, high-end PvP, Battlegrounds, etc?”. He confirmed the above, and said that the details of PvP, raids, etc in WoW didn’t matter, that it was the broad design decisions which mattered, and those he already knew without needing to participate in them. Personally, I think it’s still critically important to understand the details, since so much of the success or failure of a game rests on the level of polish, and the polish is ONLY about these details]
Q: Are MMO’s evolving quickly enough, or just putting prettier front ends on the same old idea?
AoC is clearly a WoW clone. [and then he traced it back through EQ, DikuMUD etc, as per standard analysis]. It’s nicely done, but it looks soulless, no-one’s trying to say anything through that game. EVE has soul, UO had some soul, EQ tried to have soul but didn’t really have any.
Are you trying to say freedom or constraint? EQ et al offer freedom with one hand but take it away with the other, resulting in an inability to say very much really.
I’ve never been [able to be] a player – I was a designer before MUD’s existed, because I co-wrote the first one, so I never got to enjoy that sense of delight and discovery of playing a game without looking at it as a designer.
5 replies on “Dr. Bartle: Three Views from 2018”
The slides for the Indie MMO talk are at http://mud.co.uk/richard/IMGDC2008.pdf; the difference between those and the ones I presented at the MMO Fest are not great, but in my defence I was asked to give that particular talk by Nia, so I did.
>I think we have to be careful not to mix that up with the specifics of things like the SL case, which *even with separate laws* probably would go against Linden.
Well, what went against them was the striking down of the EULA’s preference for arbitration rather than a court case. Linden Lab is registered in Delaware, is HQed in California and the complainant was in Pennsylvania. The judge decided this was inter-state, so inter-state laws applied, and they move that when it comes to arbitration, both parties need to agree to it. Bragg said he didn’t, Linden Labs said he did because he accpeted the EULA/TOS. The judge agreed with Bragg that the arbitration clause was “unconscionable”, which has a knock-on effect of making the contract itself susceptible to allegations of being “a contract of adhesion” (ie. unfair because of the unequal barganining positions of the parties).
Now whether this would have gone against Linden Labs if there had been separate laws or not I don’t know; what I do know is that this has weakened the armour of the EULA, and could quite possibly make all click-through EULAs invalid if it went to a court decision (Linden Labs settled before this happened). If all click-through EULAs were indeed rendered invalid, what would that mean for virtual worlds? Imagine if WoW had to enter into negotiations with every player when they signed up, so they could demonstrate that they knew what they were getting into. Imagine if they had to do the same thing after every patch.
Basically, unless we got new laws that allowed the current style of take-it-or-leave-it EULA (perhaps within certain parameters), we’d have no virtual worlds of any significant size at all.
> Laws generally reflect the prevailing culture (according to the lawyers), and in the prevailing culture Linden seemed to be acting unfairly
Not in the culture of the virtual world. The general sentiment among SL players seemed to be that Bragg had indeed been caught cheating, and should not have been allowed to keep his ill-gotten gains. However, Linden Labs banned him and recovered his other in-world assets, too, particularly his land (which, I believe, they sold on). This is what prompted Bragg to sue – Linden Labs had said many times that people “own” the stuff they buy. Bragg said that even if he had been banned, they couldn’t take away stuff he owned and he should be able to sell it. Linden Labs said he couldn’t sell it because he’d been banned, and therefore couldn’t access it so as to sell it, and that (basically) he hadn’t ever owned it anyway, he was just renting.
Personally, I think Bragg kinda had a point: Linden Labs did talk a lot about “ownership”, and so he did have a reasonable expectation that he did own “his” stuff (Linden Labs have changed their EULA since, to make it clearer that no, you don’t actually real-world own in-game stuff, except the IP of anything you create). However, the danger is that at some point someone may get banned from WoW or some other game world and claim that they “own” their virtual goods, based on some Lockean argument or whatever. If they won such a case, game worlds are dead in the water.
>it’s nothing more than a guess and a groundless theory until/unless you add something – anything – that makes it more solid than that
The thing about micro-payments (which are very popular in the Far East) is that if they have no gameplay effect, players are generally OK with them. They don’t mind if you pay money for your character to ride a panda instead of a horse; they do mind if the panda runs faster. For many players, the aim is to achieve, and they want to play on a level playing field. To them, if you can buy an advantage then it forces them to buy the advantage, too, which they resent. to them, it’s as if runners in the 100m in the Olympics could pay $10,000 to have their starting line moved forward a centimetre – its not fair.
Now, in many games this kind of thing isn’t all that contentious. However, in game worlds, with their Hero’s Journey underpinnings, it can be a major issue. This is why so many players are against RMT, too – it undermines the achievement hierarchy.
There are ways around this, of course (only sell people things when they’ve hit the necessary achievement levels, for example). Nevertheless, there’s some resistance to the idea of micropayments. If nothing else, people feel that they’re being ripped off (especially as these games are often advertised as “free to play”). Try playing Project Entropia as a newbie and see how far you can get without a) buying any PEDs, and b) having someone suggest to you that you buy some PEDs.
Micropayments may or may not end up undermining players’ sense of achievement, but there’s enough anecdotal evidence around to suggest that the possibility that they will do so is not entirely resident only in the land of theory.
>there are games being made that are exceptional teaching tools
There are indeed (as I mentioned in my talk, I’m acting as consultant on one). There just aren’t enough, though, and the paradigm shift we desperately need hasn’t come along yet (nor does it show any signs of doing so in the immediate future).
>my only question is why govts haven’t gone AWOL about this > 5 years ago
They’re following it, but at the moment the amounts of money involved are too small for them to waste resources. I spoke to the FSA about this last year.
There have been issues with money laundering in South Korea and China that have had side-effects on virtual worlds, particularly the clampdown that occurred after China got annoyed with QQ Coins.
>I’d be interested to know in what WAY they saw them as identical: were they just exceptionally ignorant and had no idea what either is actually like? or were they saying that, treated as a black box within wider processes / business models, the two are effectively indistinguishable?
OK, so first they generally were ignorant, in that they knew what virtual worlds were from having read about them, not from having played them. Also, though, from their point of view this was enough: they were interested in leveraging/monetising communities, and the nature of the community wasn’t on their agenda – a community is a community, right?
Sigh…
>I disagree completely. But … it’s hard, really hard, because practically all the good game design has ignored teaching to date
It’s ignored it because educators know nothing about game design (come to that, few game designers do..!). Also, few game designers are interested in pedagogy. The games that educators come up with are, in general, deeply, depressingly bad games; I don’t know how the games designed by game designers stack up in the educational world, but I can’t imagine they’re much better at teaching than educators’ games are at being fun.
I’ve had conversations with educators that ended like this:
Me: “This isn’t a game! It’s a simulation!”
Them: “OK, so what if we offer a prize to the person with the highest score?”
Me: “Aaargh!”
It’s possible to do good educational games. I personally believe that aiming to teach anything other than material at the opposite ends of the spectrum (ie. the least and most abstract ideas) is probably going to be doable better than in other ways, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong (although I doubt I will be). The question is, though: where are these good educational games? We’ve had “serious games” for over a decade – why aren’t kids playing games every day in class by now?
Yes, the older I get, the more impatient I become…
>I think it’s still critically important to understand the details, since so much of the success or failure of a game rests on the level of polish, and the polish is ONLY about these details
The details follow from the design. Polish itself isn’t a skill, polishing is the skill, and if you can do it for one aspect of design you can do it for all of them. I’ve seen WoW’s polish; I don’t need to see it in every single raid instance or in countless PvP battles to see what Blizzard’s designers do when they polish something.
Sorry for rambling on, but I thought you probably deserved some answers after such a long write-up!
Richard
Yikes. A very long (and excellent) comment! Thanks very much for taking the time to say all that.
Thanks for the nice explanation of the Bragg case. I agree that what he did initially would be unlikely to be upheld (IIRC it was near identical to any other case of accidental mispricing, which has hit many online retailers, and generally has been awarded to the retailer as an “unintentional” price, therefore not something they are required to honour?).
My comment that I felt Linden would “probably” have lost even with special laws was referring to the part where they seized all his assets. As such, I don’t think it’s a worrying sign per se – in a world where you specifically pay for goods and are told you “own” them completely, I’d expect even special VW-focussed laws to uphold your right to keep what’s yours. In this particular case, I’d expect a separate law to say it was never yours in the first place, of course :), and trump the law on ownership.
I especially liked your point about the way that other forms of entertainment have their own laws that are NOT extrapolated from the core laws, e.g. boxing does not simply inherit all the laws on assault and battery – I felt this was a very simple but effective illustration. I think people should use examples like that one more often.
My limited experience of Far East players is that they have *absolutely no problem at all* with paying for better performance in game – Kart Rider, for instance, has this right at the very core of its gameplay, and shoves it in your face at every opportunity. There’s very little else to distract from the core offer of “rent a faster car for one week, or rent it for a month at lower cost”.
Sure, this undermines (some of) the sense of achievement of (some of) the players – I’m not objecting to that. I’m objecting to the oft-proposed claim that it “ruins the game” or similar. IMHO (and this is as much a guess as are the claims I’m objecting to :)), all it does is impose some extra pressures on the pricing model of your game – get the pricing level wrong, and this is an additional way that you will irritate / lose your players. But then “getting the pricing level right” is one of the easier avenues that MMOs have generally failed to attempt, and I think it’s long overdue for more companies to start experimenting more boldly with them. NB: when I say “pricing” I mean “the actual figure you charge for each purchasable thing” rather than “what things you charge for, or how you charge for them”.
/me dances for joy to hear that there are corporates who genuinely cannot see a difference between FB and SL
The more of our competitors that are so hopelessly misguided, the better. Just makes it easier for rest of us who know even vaguely what we’re doing to make enough money doing it that we can keep on learning and improving our products :).
If someone else doesn’t get there first, I fully intend one day to make a game that really does teach people Integration, Calculus, etc. And not just the basic “sum to infinity / in the limit” aspects, but the two fundamental theorems of Integration themselves, what they mean, and what you can do from there. I’d like to teach more people to “think” in mathematics, rather than getting lost in the learning-by-rote which prevents some otherwise talented mathematicians from ever making it as far as S-level/degree-level maths, and hence never finding out how good they (would have been) really are. Not to the exclusion of core maths skills, but as a parallel track.