Book Review: Paintwork

Paintwork was a quick fun read. It's a collection of three loosely related novellas stories, all of which are science fiction with an augmented reality premise.

The first story, for which the book is named, follows a near-future graffiti artist who tags corporate AR billboards with his own custom QR codes, overwriting advertising with custom AR artwork. All is fine until someone starts tagging his works within minutes of his doing so, making him wonder if it's an inside job from within the graffiti community.

The second story, called Paparazzi, is a story about gaming culture and celebrity, with a unique take on gold-farming, and some AR stuff thrown in for good measure. It had an interesting twist at the end that made it's premise quite unique, but I found it the weakest of the three stories.

The third story, Havana Augmented, was a real gem. The story centers on some Cuba-based gamer/hacker types who, without legitimate access to technology or game content, hack their own black-market access to leading MMOs. In the process, they innovate in ways the game authors never imagined, open Cuba to investment capital interests, and go on to wage augmented-reality virtual war in the streets of Havana. I loved the vivid picture the author painted and where he ended up taking the story.

This is great near-term sci-fi, with thought provoking near-future pictures of what some of these technologies may bring, combined with action-packed stories with surprising twists.

Paintwork

"It's complicated" - or - Beating Facebook made easy

Occasionally, I'll see this on someone's Facebook profile and it always gives me a chuckle:

I find it ironic that FB gives this as an option to describe your 'relationship status', while they give no such distinction for relationships themselves, and relationships (aka 'friends') are the currency upon which FB is built. For that matter, this is true of all social networks.

Relationships are indeed complicated, and yet they aren't treated as such by these services.

I preface this post by saying that I have never worked for a social networking service, nor have I designed or built one, nor have I ever had source code access to one's inner guts.

Despite this, I have the intertube blogger bravado to state that (a) all of today's social network services are fundamentally broken, and (b) I know how to fix them. I'll also explain why I think this is going to come to a head over the coming year or two.

First, the problem. There are three components to it, two of which really just complicate the first primary issue.

First: Relationships are things, not properties of things.

I believe today's SNs are defined with connections between people being just that, connections. In database parlance, you have a table of properties describing an individual, one of which is a link to a table of 'friends', where this is a list of pointers/IDs of other individuals in the SN.

What that means is that the relationship itself is just a pointer connecting two people. But relationships are more complicated than that aren't they? As a hint, when we discuss relationships we often use nouns, not only adjectives. More on this in a minute.

Second: Not all relationships are created equal.

They certainly aren't all "friends". Of course, if all you've got is a pointer, then you've limited how much you can differentiate between relationships. At least LinkedIn uses the more generic and neutral "Connections". At least this is a term that comes with less baggage.

Third: Having this flaw in the initial design results in kludgy solutions to resulting problems that may cripple the SN.

Software design flaws are, like many things, easier to see in hindsight. In the case of database design, one clue is the amount of bandaids. We see this happening today with FB's kludgy filtering tools. I want this person to be part of this list or that list, etc.

The current 'lists' approach that FB is using is basically a kludge that lets you segregate 'friends' into a couple different groups (e.g. personal friends vs work friends). I'd imagine that each pointer now has an added field of 'type' and this is used to filter functionality ('what kind of friend is this? the kind that receives only this kind of spam but not that kind').

This will only work so long though, and the more people want to overload functionality (what if I want another type, or I have friends I want to be in both lists, etc), the more the bandaids will become cumbersome to handle and for users to manage.

The solution:

As I hinted above, I beleive there are some clues in the grammar used.

For starters, Treat relationships as nouns, which means they are entities and constitute another table in the database design of the social network.

Relationships have attributes. They have a history, a beginning and end, different properties describing what they do/don't entail, and those evolve over time. e.g. Bob and Susan went to school together but only met in their 4th year, became co-workers later, belong to the same church, etc. These are the 'adjectives' that describe the relationship. Relationships can also be assymetrical.

There are verbs too. Certain actions or activities that are part of a relationship.

I'd imagine there'd be a couple ways of implementing this. Tables for different relationship types, or a huge table sparsly populated at the outset. The choices of how to implement this will present tradeoffs between complexity, storage requirements, possibilities, etc.

At the end of the day, there will be some sweet spot in the tradeoffs that will provide the right mix of expanded functionality vs ease of use and storage/compute burden.

I'll also guess what the main pushback is going to be:

(1) The compute and storage requirements will explode! The answer to this one's easy. Tough! Both are getting cheaper, so pick the right entry point and run with it. (Remember when everyone thought Gmail was crazy for offering unlimited storage?)

(2) It will be difficult and cumbersome for people to manage: Agreed. One approach might be to pre-populate defaults people can override, or to start with a basic 'connection' and a peel-the-onion approach through both management over time and learning through history.

It may be complicated, but that doesn't mean people don't want to make sense of it.

There are three reasons why this is going to come to a head.

First the collision/connection of social networks is going to lead to a need for additional filtering/segregating, and this is going to result in a lot of bandaids for SNs that aren't built to handle this need. We've all read stories about someone's FB photos being seen by coworkers, etc. This is only going to get more complicated as people's FB feeds get seeded with their Xbox gameplay achievements or their WoW guild's political chat. The bandaids may snap.

Second, this connection of social networks is only entering its first phase, a phase where individual identities are linked (e.g. My Xbox Gamertag and my FB profile). I beleive this will enter a second stage where other entities in the SN may be shared, like the relationships themselves.

For example, today (or when the FB/Xbox integration ships anyway), I have to belong to both SNs and then tell them both that this gamertag is linked to that FB profile. However, what if I want to be friends with someone on FB when I don't have a FB account at all, but DO have an Xbox Live account? Not possible with the current bandaid solutions, but possible if relationships are tracked separately.

There's a third reason this is going to come to a head, one that arguably going to be an issue sooner than the above one. This is that people will desire more than a 1:1 mapping between identity and persona. Today, most SNs assume that your persona is your online representation of your identity. (In fact, one can argue that one reason FB stole a lot of thunder from MySpace is that it had a looser coupling between identity and persona but thats the subject of another post). However, on some MMOs, someone (one identity) may have multiple characters they play (personas).

The clash between identity and persona is going to messy on a number of fronts. In some contexts (FB, linkedin, paypal, etc) we look for identity to be real-world concrete. In others (say, playing a frilly kitten-girl in a korean MMO) someone may be looking for anonymity. Worlds collide, etc. All the more reason we provide people with tools to manage these things, rather than just labelling everyone 'friend'.

Anyhow, as these three reasons become real issues, there's an opportunity to offer a better type of SN, and beat Facebook at their own game, by being the 'next-gen social network'.

Claiming that there's an opportunity to stop the Facebook juggernaut seems like blasphemy, but people's loyalties are fickle on the Internet. The list defeated undefeatables (MySpace, Everquest, Friendster...) is long. FB is no more immune than any of them were, and the coming problems and opportunities as SNs collide may be the disruption that allows someone else to better serve people's needs.

I'd like everyone to just get along as much as the next guy, but the first step toward that might be in admitting that we're not all friends. It's more complicated than that.

Watchmen: Justice is Coming - iPhone MMO

A friend of mine had been working on a title that was all hush-hush until this past week's release. It's a Watchmen license, called Watchmen: Justice is Coming, and is an iPhone game. What's more, it's an MMO, and for the time being, is just 99 cents.

For starters, it's worth the 99 cents just to see the state of the art of 3D rasterization on the iPhone. The intro flythru with it's 8 bit alpha textures, shiny reflective wet streets and point sampling is very retro-early-90's-PC, but is nonetheless impressive. It's also quite a feat that they have a functional MMO, with realtime-ish interaction with other players (see them in the world, turn-based fighting, etc).

I'm not a fan of MMOs, and this certainly is one. There's a lot of walking, and a lot of collecting of stuff. However, I like this better than many, as its a sort of minimalist MMO. No WoW UI craziness here. Beat dudes, level up, get bitchin outfits, c'est tout.

Anyhow, be sure to check it out. It's certainly ground-breaking for an iphone title. I'm not sure what they had to go through to get an MMO working on the platform, but if iTunes were to allow in-game transactions and open the door to item-sales models, this could really be huge.

Eve and the Sacking of Rome

[update: Really good summary here.]

I've meant for a little while now to blog this really interesting development in Eve Online, in which the 'Band of Brothers' Alliance was destroyed by a rival faction. As always, I hate playing MMOs but love following the stuff that goes on in them.

For those unfamiliar:

Eve Online: (snipped from wikipedia): is a player-driven persistent-world MMO set in a sci fi space setting. Players of Eve Online are able to participate in any number of in-game professions and activities, including mining, manufacturing, trade and combat. The range of activities available to the player is facilitated by a character advancement system based upon training skills in real time, even while not logged in to the game.

The event (as Destructoid put it): In the most balls-out act of deep space espionage in the 21st century, GoonSwarm, EVE Online’s in-game Something Awful forum contingent, has finally defeated their arch enemies, absolute rulers of the game universe, Band of Brothers. Thus ends a years-long David and Goliath dance that has made modern gaming history on multiple occasions. As this is a breaking story as of today’s wee hours, I’ll spare you my verbal flatulence and put my better-informed friend Bjorn Townsend on blast:

Literally, Band of Brothers is no more. They got a spy into the executor corp at director level, kicked out every corp, stole all the assets they could lay their hands on, and altered standings so that everyone will start shooting everyone else. And then they closed the alliance, and created a new corporation called Band of Brothers with the same corp ticker, so they can't even have the old alliance name back.

How awesome is that. Even more awesome when you remember that there are ways of turning in-game currency into real-world currency, and that this cloak-n-dagger takedown netted an amount equal to about $15k USD. This is Halting State turned real, or close to it.

As usual, Raph offers an interesting perspective, which I agree with:

And the game, as a game, does want BoB to fall, because from a purely mechanical point of view, what is fun about EVE is the struggle, not the victory condition. The victory condition is boring. Lots of folks lose their livelihoods when an empire falls, and players invested in BoB are likely upset that years of work were lost. But EVE is not a game about the height of the Roman Empire. It’s a game about the sacking of Rome by barbarians, so that they can become the next short-lived top dog

Armageddon continues, some rays of light seen, etc

Man, it's getting a little scary to open up a browser over my morning coffee, lest some of the blood drip off the screen any into my americano.

Raph had a post up about the VW Management Industry Forecast which was recently published. In it, there's a great quote from Meez' Sean Ryan on his company's goals for 2009:

"Get profitable while Armageddon rolls over the industry"

Apparently, we are seeing what that armageddon looks like.

• Lots of news about MS's announced cuts (5000 jobs, 1400 of which are from E&D, including the team running the GamerScore blog and Flight Sim team.)
• Sony's going to make cuts, including games division, but no specifics.
• EA lays off 150-200 at Black Box, and others at Mythic & Tiburon.
• Eidos closes a studio in Manchester.
• Sega trimmed a few folk.

Of course we aren't immune either, having announced some fab closures and associated headcount (not games-industry exactly, but it's tech related).

Meanwhile, Ubi announced some good news, with Shaun White doing well (I'm playing a ton of it. fun), Far Cry 2 coming on as a slow burner (yay Clint!) and Prince of Persia showing signs of the same, having moved 2.2M units (yay Ben!). They are hinting at growing which is brave to say the least, but the right thing to do if you have cash in the bank and think you can use this to get ahead of competition.

Oh, and Square lays of about several hundred players, perma-banning them from the FF MMO for exploiting a bug (hello? Isn't this half of what gaming is? Excise the bug, not your customers! Jeez!)

Honoring the Legendary Customer

BoingBoing's linking to a cool story about how the makers of the Warhammer MMO are going to be erecting statues of the top players in the game world to honor their accomplishments.



Very cool indeed.

The thought exercise for the reader is this: if games did more gestures like this for customers, wouldn't that be a more-carrot-less-stick approach to the piracy problem? (Not unlike the personalized game idea I discussed a while back).

Book Review: Settlers of the New Virtual Worlds

So I've just finished Settlers of the New Virtual Worlds, by Erik Bethke & Erin Hoffman. It's actually both written and edited by them because the bulk of the book is a collection of essays by others.

The book's focus is on the evolving world of MMOs and virtual worlds, and how their progress and evolution is going to demand they transcend the current one-sided state of their EULA's, grant users (scratch that, residents) rights, and discusses many of the issues involved in doing so.

In short, it's a must read for anyone in the games industry - not just in the business of MMOs - and for anyone that is interested in the future of the medium. The book contains many provocative ideas. Not all are great, but that it will spur thought and discussion is reason enough to recommend it.

Among my favorite bits:

• Raph Koster's piece on a declaration of player's rights (borrowing heavily from the 1789 French Declaration of Man and the Citizen and from the US bill of rights).
• Ren Reynolds' piece on issues with claims with virtual property and IP in which he compares with precedents in both US and UK law and shows just how murky the water might be.
• Erik Bethke's opening and closing pieces in which he seems to be putting his money where his mouth is, as he's taken some bold steps with his own EULA, for GoPets, which he runs.

There are some not so good bits as well (I won't name them) but you shouldn't let them stop you from picking up the book.

My only complaint was that there wasn't one of the essays that attempted to tackle the issue of virtual property as a sort of promisory note of service, as I've alluded to before*.

Anyhow, pick it up. Good read.

* One additional thought on the 'promise of service' idea. It's occurred to me in re-reading my earlier post in current economic times, that this is not unlike a sort of derivative. I have to think about that a little before expanding on it.

The Virtual World Taxman Cometh

As aluded to previously, we all knew it was coming.

Raph points us to this: Virtual Worlds News: China Levies 20% Tax on Virtual Currencies

And notes:

[the ruling] seems to apply whether or not the value is cashed out.

(and goes on to note)

However, if the value is not cashed out and taxes are still paid, that could mean (maybe should mean) that the companies are liable if they manage to accidentally delete some of it. In other words, they’re banks.

I commented on his post that non-Chinese MMOs like Wow are probably glad they licensed the right to run servers in that country to other parties. Boggles the mind to think how something like this would apply, be determined, be policed, etc, if numerous countries were to institute similar laws. Thousands of individuals all paying taxes on income incurred in other countries (where the servers reside), and businesses in some cases being run from elsewhere than where the servers reside. Blech. What a mess!

It's already moderately messy to do taxes for, say, stock purchases & sales, if you do anything moderately frequent in the way of trading. Now imagine that on a micro-scale at an accelerated pace. 

As I understand it, in the USA, Internet commerce has been relatively hands-off in the area of taxation; as an incentive to promote growth. However that can't last forever, can it? At some point, growth has happened. Plus, no one is doing VW business in the US only going forward. 

This whole idea of 'countries' is obsolete :-)

$38M Bust in Korean MMO laundering case

"...Korean police arrested a group responsible for laundering money generated by CHinese gold farming from Korea back to the mainland. Over 18 months, the group wired $38M from Korea to a Hong Kong paper company [ed. Mildly ironic] as payments for purchases." (link)

As Raph concisely puts it "...and where it happens on large scales, regulation cannot be far behind."

Precendents...

More legal precendents being set in MMO's/Virtual worlds:

1. Tokyo woman jailed for logging into husband's Maple Story account and killing his avatar (link). I wonder: If she was a noob and did this accidentally, would his have been VW manslaughter?

2. Dutch teens convicted of VW theft after logging into Runescape and roughing him up and taking his virtual items (link). 

The latter of these is particularly interesting. If the game allows "roughing up", then hasn't the victim here subscribed to a PvP portion of the game/world? If not, how did it happen. If so, then hasn't he opted to allow this kind of thing to happen? Seems like if a hockey player were suing for getting checked.

Areae now Metaplace, gets more money

Congrats to Raph and company for closing their series B round for 6.7M.

Among the investors is Marc Andreesen, which I view as - at least in this case - a 'smarter than the average bear' investor. His take on 'levels of internet platforms' which I previously blogged, would class Metaplace as a 'level 3 platform'. I view this as a very strong endorsement of Metaplace. 

Go Raph!

Bartle's Indie MMO Conference Keynote

Here's an Indie MMO conference going on in Minnesota (?) and it looks like Richard Bartle's keynote was really good.

Gamasutra has a good synopsis, and Bartle has posted slides.

His keynote looks back 20 years, from the year 2028, and paints three alternate portraits of the future: One in which game designers and other creatives thrive (the good), one in which lawyers and accountants stifle development (the bad), and one in which business and academia drive VW's to practical usage - and thus make them mundane in the process (the ugly).

On the front of the second of those possible futures, Congress recently held hearings on Virtual Worlds.

Build-a-Bear building a head of steam

Build-a-Bear's online virtual world, buildabearville, which I wrote about here and on Gamasutra, hit 1 million users it's first month, and recently 2 million (it's less than 3 months old). They are also adding celeb appearances with kids from High School Musical and the like.

Phenomenal. How many other MMO/VW's are going to sneak up and surpass the traditional games industry?

Internet reports shortage of [255,166,166]

Hello Kitty Online, the spectacularly pink virtual world, has opened for business. Millions of girls (and some boys) the world round are as excited as the girl standing next to Hello Kitty herself (himself?) below.

While I'm not an MMO player, I'm willing to give to give it a shot if it will make me feel like that girl does. Who wouldn't? :-)




Thanks to Raph for the link.

Felt tables and MMOs, and Match-3's of a different kind

One of the sessions at DICE that I found particularly interesting, if only because it was from a another 'games industry' all together, was one from Roger Snow, a VP at ShuffleMaster, a company supplying the casino industry with all kinds of game products. Among them, licensed table games, which is what this session was about.

The market for table games is $50M worldwide. Small compared to our industry, but then I'm not sure how it would compare to, say, the licensing of IP in the casual games industry, which is perhaps something it's more comparable to.

Snow explained how the bulk of table games on casino floors are public domain games (Blackjack, Poker, etc). In an effort to make games more interesting, people have come up with variants that are more engaging. Things like side-bets, progressive pots, etc, and cross-cultural game mashups are added to come up with things like Ultimate Draw Poker, Four Card Poker, Pai Gow Poker, Carribean Stud, etc.

These games are then, provided the IP is properly protected, licensed to casinos for a flat fee. They then operate them hoping they'll yield more revenue than the public domain fare they are replacing.

I was surprised a little that the flat-fee licensing model was the only model used (at least that he discussed). Wouldn't a royalty make more sense? Pay for performance and all that. I'm guessing that the casinos aren't enthused about sharing revenue numbers with partners and making themselves auditable, etc, and that's likely the reason.

Anyhow. He went on to speak a little about the games in this business and made the following points:

- The business is relatively young. The first licensed game only emerged in the 80's.

- About 50 new games are introduced every year. Only ONE will be successful, and when it does, it will last a long time.

- Acheiving critical mass is important. People need to recognize the game when going from one casion to the other.

- In the past 15 years or so, there have been 10 hits. That's it.

So the epiphany that I had was that this sounded an awful lot like MMOs. How many successful MMOs has our industry seen in the past decade? Maybe a dozen? The critical mass element applies too.

Contrast that to the points Snow made about the slot machine business:

- There's a glut of content, with hundreds or even thousands of games introduced every year.

- Games are given at best a couple months to succeed, and if they don't perform they are pulled from the floor.

- In cases where they do succeed, imitators soon follow, copying whatever the latest twist is on the match-3 mechanic.

- While there's a little technical innovation (bigger screens, better graphics, etc), a far surer path to money is to license a piece of well known IP and wrap a traditional game mechanic around it. Plenty of Wheel of Fortune, Tabasco, Alien, Adams Family, Price is Right, Beverly Hillbillies are just a few examples.

Sounds just a little like the casual games business doesn't it? Right down to the oft-seen match-3 mechanic.

There are of course many differences. Development budgets between felt table games ("some rules and a piece of felt with some circles on it" was how Snow put it) and MMOs, are just one example.

Still, I feel there must be some lessons to be learned here.

Maybe that's why EA's Louis Castle is on Shufflemaster's board?

Halting State's Sharpening Focus

I purchased Charles Stross' Halting State a while back but only got to reading it while on vacation last week.

It's a fun read. Not a great read, but a fun one, and one that should be required reading for those in our industry.

The book is a story of a couple reluctant heros that get wrapped up in an investigation of bank heist that unravels into a story of international espionage, etc, etc. On that basis alone, it's kind of a 'B' read. It's not a superb story as far as heist or spy stories, and doesn't have the page-turning action sequences of, say, Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash, though there are parts that almost get there.

However, what makes the book interesting, and makes Snowcrash a good point of comparison, is that the bank heist takes place in a virtual world, with a band of rogue players cleaning out a bank and then selling off the items for millions via online auctions. The heros' sleuthing takes place in both the real and virtual worlds.

Where the book succeeds, as Raph Koster pointed out a while ago, is in how well it nails all the details and issues around virtual worlds. To quote Raph:

Among the stuff that pops up, “namechecked” so to speak: PvP sploits. God mode. ORLY. Zombie flash mobs. Leveraging ARGs for real work. Impositional game design. VC bubble shenanigans. Cross-world avatar portability. Cons and cosplay. Discworld. LARPing. 4th edition D&D. Second Life. Mirror worlds.

... add to that Augmented Reality, cross-platform gaming, serious games, using VW's to launder money, etc, etc. Stross shows that he really gets it, and as great science fiction should, projects the possible implications that stem from the 'science'.

The thing that struck me most was this: If Stephenson's Snowcrash drew us a picture of the metaverse (and excited a bunch of people enough to run out and start VRML companies :-), then Stross, some fifteen years later, uses his book as a lense to sharpen that picture for us.

Highly recommended. Go Get it!

More on the mainstreaming of games

If this isn't a great example of mainstream of games, then I don't know what is.

From the description on youtube:

Blizzard has teamed up with iCoke, Coca-Cola's name-brand presence in China to create a joint World of Warcraft and Coca-Cola televised commercial, featuring Chinese pop sensation SHE...

The Onslaught of Toys-Featuring-Online-Games continues

I recently blogged about the wave of kids toys that are shipping with online games (in some cases multiplayer/mmo-ish games) as 'features' - a checklist item to help sell the game.

Well, here's another to add to the list:

Swypeout is a collectible card game that ships with a USB device with a bar code reader. Cards can be swiped through the reader, and then the car appears in an online racing game. Kids can then race their cars against others. Video trailer of gameplay below, and card example below that.

This is sort of Pod (dating myself) meets Motor City Online (dating myself again) meets Toon-town.

I include the Toon-town reference because like with that MMO, chat is via picking from canned phrases, and no path to lead to outside Internet, thus alleviating parents fears of card-swiping child molesters and the like.

This is an interesting one to keep an eye on for two reasons:

First off, it's more of a real-time 3D action game. The spend on the client (from screenshots & movies, I havent' downloaded it yet) looks to be bigger than that of UBFunkeys or the others.

Secondly, it skews older. The toy states "6 and up", but you look at the boys in the video on the site (whom I presume are representative of the target customer), and they look 10-13-ish. Now we are heading into the demographic that competes with (tongue firmly in cheek) 'real games'.

Playable instruments in Lord of the Rings MMO

Alice pointed out that Lord of the Rings Online has playable instruments, and that as a result, people are doing awesome ingame music (original, covers, multi-player jam sessions, etc).

Wow. Cool. Way to go Turbine.

Searching youtube for 'LOTRO music' yields plenty of good examples. Here's one.

MMO Spam

An interesting piece of spam got through the mail filter today. Most of it was in Korean, but from what I could tell, it was for a dating service/site that runs *within* Ragnarok Online, the Korean MMO.

Not the worst idea I've heard of, I guess.

And hey, if they were running it within one of Shanda's MMO's, you might even be able to hook up with someone of the desired gender!