One of my biggest gripes about most online social networks that I participate in (Facebook, LIVE, etc) is the absence of functionality that takes into account how “strong” or “open” my friendship is with any given person. Fixing this is a major opportunity — if not a long-term, competitive imperative — for social networks in general, and the video game ecosystems that aspire to be legitimate social networks in specific.

We do not treat all our friends and acquaintances equally in real life, so why should social networks force us to treat our online connections in equal fashion? People need tools that enable them to selectively modify how any given user in their network can view their profile, interact with them, etc. This process of selective modification can be sped up with user-defined “friend types” that can be applied, in a stroke, to many users in a network.

For example, were such a system to be implemented for LIVE or Facebook, I would personally choose to break all my connections into three categories:

• Friend Type 1: People who are my very close friends and family — I am always happy for them to know when I’m online, and always happy to receive direct messages or status updates from them. Communications from people in this category should be marked as special and/or sorted to the top of the list. Also, if I’m in the middle of a conversation or game with somebody, these are the only people who I want to be able to “interrupt” in any way.
• Friend Type 2: People who are friends, co-workers, business partners, neighbors, etc. These people account for the vast majority of my social network connections. I’m generally quite happy to connect with them, and I want to know what is happening in their lives, but I don’t need to see every single photo they’ve commented on and every ticket they’ve received in Parking Wars — it clogs my news feed and annoys me. I’d also like the system to intelligently manage (and by that, I mean condense) status updates and other communications from people in this category who, to put it politely, tend to over-communicate — much as I appreciate minute-by-minute updates on their dog’s diarrhea or baby’s rash, those things clog my news feed and inbox in an unacceptable manner, too.
• Friend Type 3: People who I’d rather not be connected to online, but whose invitation I cannot refuse or ignore for practical reasons. I don’t want these people to know that I am online, and I don’t want to see their broadcast updates. The very best thing a social network can do for me, in this situation, is creatively mask my presence yet still give these “friends” the impression that they are meaningfully connected to me.

For years now, most IM clients have offered rudimentary tools that enable you to segment your friends into the groups I’ve defined above (though they do a poor job of helping you to effortlessly create the “meaningful” connection I describe in Type 3.) Most video game ecosystems and social networks need to offer the same tools — if not something much better. Otherwise, the mere act of logging in will become increasingly painful for our most connected users — the people with the most “connection spam” to deal with, and the very people we most want to keep happy.

I’m not as passionate as some people are about video game reviews (and how flawed they may or may not be.) I think there’s clearly room for improvement in the way the average review is conducted, but I also think that the answer to the problem will come in the form of review sites that cater to specific audiences; i.e. the 30+ crowd, or the socially-conservative crowd, etc. That said, I would like to express the opinion that all review sites, in general, should be careful how they incorporate “lasting appeal” into their scoring system.

The inspiration for this post comes from the IGN review of Braid. I’m absolutely not complaining about it — the review was positive and enthusiastic, and the reviewer did exactly what they were supposed to do within the particular constraints of the IGN review system. But IGN’s final score is one of the lowest given to Braid, apparently because Braid lacks “lasting appeal” — one of IGN’s five primary review criteria. IGN appears to define “lasting appeal” as a combination of sufficient game length and replayability. So how about it… does Braid really lack “lasting appeal?”

Does The Godfather Have “Lasting Appeal?”

Before you answer that question, ask yourself this: do films like The Godfather and The Empire Strikes Back have “lasting appeal?” It doesn’t take long to watch them, and once you’ve done so, you’ve seen everything there is to see. Nevertheless, I’ve watched both of those movies more times than I can count. And I’m fairly certain that despite having solved its puzzles, I’ll come back to Braid at some point, even if many years down the line (when I’ve forgotten most of the solutions!) I’ll also be loading Braid every time a friend who hasn’t played it drops by (much the same way I’ve chosen to re-watch great movies that I’m already “finished with” when friends who haven’t seen them drop by.)

Is “Lasting Appeal” Even Relevant?

Perhaps that argument doesn’t sway you. If not, ask yourself another question: how much money are you willing to spend for an hour of uninterrupted, high-quality entertainment? I know that’s not an entirely fair question; after all, everything is relative when it comes to price and consumption. (Just because you’re willing to spend $10 for a two-hour movie doesn’t mean you will be willing to spend $10 for a two-hour game.) Nevertheless, if Braid gives you three to six hours of great entertainment for $15, isn’t that a reasonably good deal in and of itself? Does it even matter if you never touch the game again?

For a young person with lots of free time and very little cash to spend, perhaps the answer is “yes.” But for someone with little free time, many obligations, and other interests besides gaming (i.e., most of my friends) replayability is a minor concern at best. Such people want to have fun, experience new gameplay and new narratives, and then move on to other things. They — that is we — don’t care about IGN’s definition of “lasting appeal.”

Full Circle

Which leads me back to my original point: the answer to the problem with reviews is more focused review sites that cater to specific target audiences. Many such sites already exist, but don’t necessarily have the legitimacy of an IGN or 1UP. We in the industry need to make an effort to identify the best of these sites and embrace them, so that they are not at a disadvantage relative to the old traditional standbys, and so that they can eventually attract a large enough audience to help change the way we all think about games — for the better.

The Freakanomics blog is worth subscribing to, if you haven’t already. Via it comes word of a neat experiment: in the psychology department coffee room at Newcastle University, prices for tea and coffee were posted on the wall, and an “honesty box” (i.e., in which to place your payment) was set nearby. This sort of experiment is fairly common, but the twist was that, in some weeks, a photo of flowers appeared above the price list. In other weeks, it was a pair of human eyes, staring directly at the person reading the price list. In weeks with eyes on the list, staff paid 2.76 times as much for their drinks.

This brought to mind my earlier post on the wonderful book Predictably Irrational, which noted that you could dramatically cut down on cheating in exams if you simply asked students to recall the Ten Commandments before they took a test, or — more pointedly — by reminding them of a school honor code. (You had to do this right before the test — it couldn’t happen weeks before and still retain the effect.)

A long time ago, I wrote an article for Gamasutra exploring the possible design of a feedback/rating system that would discourage antisocial behavior in MMOs. That system, which still may have merit, pales in comparison to the wonderful elegance and simplicity of these psychological tricks. And given that (1) one of the biggest challenges for online, anonymous systems like MMOs (and LIVE) is antisocial behavior, and (2) companies are spending tens of millions of dollars on these systems (if not more), why aren’t more companies hiring psychologists and behavioral economists as consultants or full-time employees? The cost seems justified, given the potential benefits.

(Actually, I’ve heard of a few MMO developers hiring economists, but I think that most are focused on the optimization of in-game economies, as opposed to tackling anti-social behavior. There is a relationship between the two, but they are not equivalent.)

I just landed in Sweden for the Nordic Game Conference and I’m trying to stay awake for several more hours in order to get my body accustomed to the time difference. So I apologize if this reads incoherently; I’m truly half-asleep right now…

While on the plane here, I finally finished reading Dan Ariely’s new book, Predictably Irrational. Dan was one of my professors at MIT and is an all-around great guy. His book does a wonderful job of explaining how human beings are consistently irrational in many situations (such as when we make purchase decisions), and more importantly, it explores the implications of this irrationality for individuals, businesses, governments, and society at large. I don’t recommend books very often, but this is one that everybody should read. It is business book, self-help guide, and profound social commentary all in one tidy package.

Of course, while I was reading the book, I couldn’t help but tie back some of its lessons to video games. For example:

Dan writes quite a bit about pricing strategies, and how they can be used to take advantage of our predictable irrationality. One section in particular on the power of “free!” was obviously quite relevant to our industry given the rise of F2P games. Through multiple studies, Dan has found that the allure of free will not only cause people to consume things they otherwise would not have consumed (obvious), but will also cause them to forgo real bargains on products they prefer and could easily have afforded. This raises big questions for developers who plan to compete against F2P games on the PC primarily on the basis of quality…

Predictably Irrational also makes some interesting points about how everything is relative to human beings, including price. For example, restaurants can cause you to spend more simply by putting a very high-priced item on the menu. You probably won’t buy that item, but seeing it makes you more likely to buy the second or third most expensive item on the menu. Interesting examples like this made me wonder: how many F2P games have outrageously expensive virtual items for the sole purpose of driving up consumption of less expensive items “on the menu?”

One fascinating section on ethics and honesty noted that you could dramatically cut down on cheating in exams if you simply asked students to recall the Ten Commandments before they took a test, or (more pointedly) by reminding them of a school honor code. But you had to do this right before the test — it couldn’t happen weeks before and retain the effect. This made me wonder if online games, many of which have serious problems with griefers and other anti-social types, might benefit greatly by simply requiring users to read a one-sentence statement on positive social behavior each time they log in.

Anyway, there was so much more to the book than this. You really should check it out.

As I mentioned several months back, my friend Ethan Mollick and I are writing a book tentatively titled For Fun and Profit: How Games are Transforming the Business World. As our publisher’s deadline approaches, I’d like to occasionally bounce early draft excerpts off of you all in hopes of getting useful feedback. And, to be honest, I find it difficult to maintain this blog and write my book simultaneously, so I’m cheating a little bit. :-)

My first draft excerpt has nothing to do with business, per se. It tackles the thorny issue of games and violence. Ethan and I feel that we cannot ignore this issue if we want our book to be taken seriously by a broad range of readers. But we also don’t want to get mired in the issue — after all, there are so many other things we need to cover! So we’ve tried to be brief, clear, and to the point. Tell me: did we succeed in getting the point across?

Games and Violence

Games have been criticized as “excessively violent” for decades. Such criticism first reached fever pitch in 1992, when a popular game called Mortal Kombat enabled players to gruesomely slay an opponent by, for example, ripping off his head and holding it in the air while the spine dangled below. At the time of its release, Mortal Kombat was considered visually stunning, but its graphics pale in comparison to those of modern games. As the graphical fidelity of video games has improved, various social, professional, and governmental organizations, as well as high-profile politicians like Senators Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman, have expressed increasing concern over the potential impact of “realistic” interactive violence on children. These fears have been intensified by reports from organizations such as the American Psychological Association, which have claimed to link violent games to increased aggression inside and outside the laboratory¹.

These criticisms have been rebutted by a variety of prominent independent academics and organizations. Most notably, the American Sociological Association (ASA) and British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) recently issued reports that seem highly supportive of the video game industry. The ASA noted that in the 10 years following the release of games such as Doom and Mortal Kombat, homicide arrest rates among juveniles fell by 77%², an especially notable figure given that videogame usage skyrocketed during the same timeframe. More notably, the ASA found that much of the research employed against video games had decontextualized violence. In the words of the report, “Poverty, neighborhood instability, unemployment, and even family violence fall by the wayside in most of these studies. Ironically, even mental illness tends to be overlooked in this psychologically oriented research. Young people are seen as passive media consumers, uniquely and uniformly vulnerable to media messages.” Likewise, after performing its own extensive research study, the BBFC found that, “far from having a potentially negative impact on the reaction of the player, the very fact that they have to interact with the game seems to keep them more firmly rooted in reality. People who do not play games raise concerns about their engrossing nature, assuming that players are also emotionally engrossed. This research suggests the opposite; a range of factors seems to make them less emotionally involving than film or television.” This conclusion – that video games might actually exert less influence on aggression than film or television – is especially remarkable in light of the importance and charter of the organization that produced it.

But perhaps the most important argument against critics of violence in games is simply that games have a prominent rating system, much like movies do. That rating system can be used by parents to filter the games they are comfortable exposing their children to, an acceptable solution given that 90% of games are purchased by adults over the age of 18.³

¹ http://www.apa.org/releases/videogames.html
² http://www.asanet.org/galleries/default-file/Winter07ContextsFeature.pdf
³ http://www.theesa.ca/facts-gameviolence.html

Nothing says “the holidays” like plenty of food, drink, friends, and family. And party games, of course. My closet is overflowing with board games and peripherals just waiting to be unleashed on visitors (aka “informal market research participants,” aka “gracious victims of enthusiasm.”)

Guitar Hero remains popular on these occasions (which is no statement against Rock Band — I simply haven’t acquired a personal copy yet. Much as I’ve enjoyed my three fruitless visits to EB…) And yet, Guitar Hero 3 failed me as a party game until I finally gave up on “principle” and unlocked a couple cheats — specifically “no fail” mode and “unlock all songs.” So now I’m having more fun with my friends and family, but I’m a “cheater.” Oops.

I didn’t have much choice, you see. Eve’s little sister kept failing the same (beginner’s) song in coop play over and over again — neither easy mode nor my desperate attempts to save us with star power ultimately helped. And since I haven’t had time to naturally unlock every song in the game, my guests have proved less than impressed with an artificially-limited portion of GH3′s already-spotty song list.

Which brings me to today’s question: why force customers to rely on “cheats” for content or functionality that makes a game more enjoyable in the context of a party? Why not offer a party mode that includes all songs, all (or most) avatars, and the option to completely avoid song failure? After all, party players can still focus on the challenge of hitting more notes than their friends, getting a longer note streak, etc. And hardcore gamers can still be encouraged to progress through career mode by putting the bulk of the game’s Achievements there — not to mention by offering them interesting functionality built around leaderboards, etc.

I’m picking on GH3, but this thinking applies to any party game. And, in a looser sense, it applies to most video games in general. As I’ve written in the past, I believe there is demand for games that bridge audiences by offering inexperienced people a way to play along with experienced gamers. How many cooperative action games might Eve be willing to play if she could activate “casual” or “companion mode” while I played normally? Not a “cheat mode” buried behind a secret code, though the functionality I’m talking about usually isn’t even available as a cheat or otherwise.

See, Eve wouldn’t be “cheating” — she’d be “having fun.” There’s a big difference.

I watched This Film Is Not Yet Rated a few days ago. Very interesting documentary (if “preachy”, but aren’t they all?) I recommend that you see it. All the issues raised in the film can be applied to the video game industry, and all are worth discussing, but I want to talk about just one, brief part. In the film, one person argues that (and I’m paraphrasing here): “violence with no gore should be reserved for adults, who can intellectually handle the fiction of it. Violence with realistic gore is what should be considered safe for kids.”

I’m not a psychiatrist. I don’t have kids. I can’t claim that I have a deep understanding of what does and does not negatively impact child development (beyond the obvious things — lack of affection, lack of education, lack of sustenance, etc — stuff we as a society manage to ignore every day in favor of more sensational news.) All that said, this argument struck a cord with me. Let me explain.

The Milgram and Stanford prison experiments

For years, I’ve felt that we shield our children (and ourselves!) from the very information that could spare us from repeating the worst of history’s mistakes. My favorite example has always been the brilliant Milgram experiments. (If you are not familiar with this, you must click that link!) Milgram’s work, along with the Stanford prison experiment proved (to me) that the vast majority of human beings, even those living in a free, “enlightened” place like the USA, have the capacity for great evil — and it doesn’t take much to expose that capacity.

So what’s my point? Well, the first time I learned of these experiments was during my freshman year of college, when I saw two video documentaries about them. Many people will never see these documentaries or learn of them. I think that’s a crime. Every single high school student should be required to watch and write about this material. (Maybe even junior high school students — after all, that’s the time when school bullying starts to become really nasty. Maybe this would help.) Teaching kids about tradgedies like the Holocaust and the Rawandan genocide is not enough. It’s too easy to learn of those things and think “wow, neither I nor anyone I know could ever be a part of something like that.” We need to teach our children that it isn’t that simple.

(Side note: my wife happens to work for an organization called Facing History which teaches kids to think about these issues. It must be working, because I’m writing this article.)

Truth in advertising (and entertainment)

Now to cut closer to home. In general, I think that we overly shield our children (and ourselves) from the truth about violence. I’m not arguing that every violent game should accurately depict reality… but perhaps a few more should.

I will never forget the first time I saw Saving Private Ryan. Not because it was a great movie, but because it literally turned my stomach. The movie recreates the storming of Normandy; at the time, it was the most honest depiction of brutality and suffering that I had ever seen. I would contend that most people cannot watch this movie and, at least temporarily, remain enthusiastic about war. (Or perhaps, anything less than the most noble and necessary of wars.)

Saving Private Ryan put violence to good use. It absolutely changed me (for the better, I hope). How many games can you say that about… at least in this context?

How many games make you suffer heart-wrenching wails of fear from your victims before you hurt them? How many games make you stomach the broken sobs of the dying? Or for that matter, the agony of their surviving friends and relatives? In other words, how many games make you feel sorry for hurting someone? (I imagine a thousand voices screaming Bioshock at this juncture. It’s a start.)

A different spin on “everything bad is good for you”…

We as an industry and we as a society need to rethink our attitude towards violence in television, movies, and games. This simply isn’t a cut and dry issue, as so many people (on both sides of the isle) like to pretend it is. Violence in media is not obviously bad, and not obviously innocuous. We have a constitutional right to express violence in our art (as well we should), but that does not give us the right to do so without reflection.

Some media really is “too violent” for young people. And some media… some media just isn’t violent enough.

Memorial weekend has slipped by. My folks were visiting from out of town. They asked the usual questions about what I do, and only time will tell if my answers were more satisfying than usual. (I’m think that analogies to retail businesses help.)

We did not play video games.

Given my occupation, why is that the case? Because I don’t currently own any video games that would do a better job of bringing us together (and creating time/space to chat) than old-fashioned, non-digital Scrabble or Blokus. So we played Blokus.

I know that my family is not alone. And it’s clear that many developers have identified the opportunity to fill this specific need. That said, I wonder how many developers are asking themselves the simple question: how is the party game I’m creating significantly better than a traditional board game?

Locally-played video games have a big disadvantage over board games — players are staring in the same direction (at the TV) rather than across a board at each other. And board games create opportunities for conversation by their very nature, while most video games are designed to engage people in such a way as to eliminate the possibility of meaningful conversation. (Compare playing Scrabble to the stereotypical “collection of mini-games” party video game. While one Scrabble player thinks about her move, the other three can speak freely. But when all four people are playing mini-games, they’re more constantly engaged in the gameplay, but their conversations with one another are shallower.)

Is this inherently a problem? I don’t think so, no. There’s definitely a place for party games that put play before conversation. And of course, there’s something to be said for the spoken and unspoken communication that takes place during a session of Wii Tennis. But I can’t help thinking that an important audience is currently being under-served, and that games like Buzz are just the tip of the iceberg.

So what’s below the tip? I’m not sure. Games that turn the TV into an important (but not sole) component of play could be a start. Games that make you need and/or want to look at the people you’re playing with. Maybe these games would involve proprietary peripherals, and maybe not. Maybe they’d create and enhance (as opposed to minimize) downtime, and maybe not.

Maybe I shouldn’t pontificate at two in the morning. Maybe not. :-)

The Restaurant Game is a research project at the MIT Media Lab that will algorithmically combine the gameplay experiences of thousands of players to create a new game… Everyone who plays The Restaurant Game will be credited as a Game Designer… Designers will be ranked based on how well they play their assigned roles… There will be only one Lead Designer… This project attempts to address two frustrations I experienced as a professional game developer. 1) Convincing human social behavior is difficult to model with existing hand crafted AI systems. 2) Play testing by people outside of the development team typically comes too late to have a major impact on the final product.

Real-time communication in modern MMORPGs is a funny thing. With rare exception, it tends to resemble anything but “role-playing”. MMO user text generally consists of acronyms (LOL, ROFL, etc), poor grammar, and a million little references to the outside world (“hang on, my dog is barking.”) Speech is, in some ways, even worse — nothing like the screech of a petulant 10-year-old (or the sound of a toilet flushing in the background) to disturb the illusion of fantasy.

Outside the context of self-policed, dedicated role-playing servers, this may be impossible to “fix”. I put “fix” in quotes because it’s unclear that this is a problem of any real significance — it’s quite possible that the majority of potential players really don’t miss the opportunity to role-play more deeply, even in the “perfect” environment for it. But my gut tells me that, at a bare minimum, there’s room for something more than what’s available today.

And given that, I just don’t understand why better voice-masking technology hasn’t found its way into MMORPGs yet. I know it’s complicated, but I refuse to believe it’s impossible to create efficient software that makes a 10-year old girl sound like an orc (or a 30-year old man sound like a female elf, for that matter.) And I have to believe that such software would not only be extremely popular in MMORPGs, but in many online virtual environments. The benefits:

• Greatly enhances role-playing.
• Eliminates “I hate the sound of my own voice on the answering machine” syndrome.
• Greatly reduces shyness. (Voice chat is far more intimate than text chat. There’s a reason most non-hardcore gamers still don’t indulge in much voice chat with strangers online, and that voice-chat is less popular in more reserved cultures.)

Many people are wondering what will define “the next World of Warcraft“. It would be egotistical at best to imply that I hold the answers to that question — I certainly don’t. But if I had to take a wild guess, I’d say there’s a decent chance that the next WoW will offer:

1. Significantly better integration of user-generated content. (A virtual world is really not much of a world at all if its inhabitants can’t change it. And virtual worlds are growing too large for even the best-funded dev team to populate with content.) And/or,
2. Better and more numerous opportunities for users to express themselves. That brings me back to user-generated content, but it also brings me back to my original point — the most basic form of self-expression — direct communication. Virtual voice.

And yeah, I really want to sound like an ancient dragon. Or an English-speaking cave serpent. So sue me.

PS. My friend Tom Cadwell raises an excellent point: it’s unclear what the ethical, legal, and PR implications of virtual-voice technology would be if it were used, for example, by sexual predators to more effectively prey on children. I haven’t immediately thought of a great response to this; I can only ask “where do you draw the line?” Should we shut down MySpace because it makes life easier for some deviants? Eliminate webcams? This is a far larger debate.