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SWTOR sent me an e-mail requesting feedback today....

2012-01-31T13:12:00.000-08:00

From: David Grundy
Sent: Tue 31/01/2012 10:29
To: 'FeedbackSWTOR@SWTOR.com'
Subject: SWTOR Feedback

Dear Customer Support Team,

Having purchased your game for the launch, and having logged around 6 days of time on it over the last month and a half, I find myself well placed to give you some pointed feedback.

Currently, and unfortunately (as I’ve enjoyed the 1-49 experience), I will not be renewing my subscription; this is why.

· The game desperately needs a “Looking For Instance” or “Looking For Flashpoint” quick instance playing mechanism. Desperately.

· The game is currently not optimised for usage of dual processor cores, which the vast majority of machines these days have, and so on very high end machines only a fraction of the true capability of the machine is being used leading to much higher load times and lower FPS rates than should really be experienced.

· Far, far to many loading screens. That take far too long to load. I literally have a book next to my computer so I can read a few pages while I wait the 1-2 minutes for the screen to load. Given the amount of instance changes you make in the game, this is an intolerable nuisance.

· I finished my class quest at level 49, and pretty much now have nothing to do. This is bad design, as I’m sure at level 50 there is lots of direction towards your Elder Game activities, but at 49 there is nothing, with the game feeling done and finished. This should not be occurring, I should not have, after finishing my class quest, to go back and “grind more droids” to be able to progress. The class quest should be gated so that you can *only* finish it at level 50. To do otherwise simply gives a very poor game play experience.

I could give you a much longer list of considerably more, but I feel that very long list would probably not be constructive.

As a MMO researcher and academic (my PhD is in Customer Relationship Management in MMO games) I was extremely interested to see how SWTOR would progress and be a success, and I really hope that in future months you make the significant corrections necessary that your online community have been asking for. Perhaps then, given the high quality of the content, I may be persuaded to re-subscribe.

Currently, however the game is not meeting the most basic benchmarks of quality which I would expect from a Bioware game.

Kind Regards

Dr. David Grundy

PhD MA BA (Hons) PCAP (SEDA)

Programme Director of Undergraduate Cross-School Modules

Principal Lecturer, Accounting and Financial Management

Newcastle Business School

Northumbria University

City Campus East 1

Newcastle Upon Tyne

NE1 8ST

Email: david.grundy@northumbria.ac.uk

Newcastle Business School – ranked in the Top 10 for Graduate Level Employability, ‘The Sunday Times Good University Guide 2012’

Most Educational Forum Post Award of 2012?

2012-01-06T01:41:00.000-08:00

Tis just a few days into 2012 and the SWTOR community forums have already thrown up one of the best forum threads and initial posts I've read on a MMORPG forum in a while. A simple plea to the community to "think critically", with a full explaination of what critical thinking is, and indeed a link to a very useful Youtube video (which I may indeed link some of my students to!) regarding what critical thinking means.

It is of course a pity that such pleas are rejected out of hand so quickly, but that is the nature of (almost) every forum I've ever read (possibly bar Terra Nova, but thats the complete opposite at times). I also thought the quick run down on logical fallacy was really well considered.

The next thing to talk about here is logical fallacy. There are things that are
presented as evidence that are actually not evidence. Here's a short list:

Ad-Hominem Attack: "Well you're a noobtart who prolly clicks and keyboard turns, so ur opinion is invalid." If the player cited is good at
the game or not is irrelevant to the discussion.

Argument from
Authority: "I'm a game developer myself, and I say that this game will succeed
beyond anything rational." The poster's credentials are irrelevant to the
discussion. If they are correct, they should be able to provide evidence of
their claim.

Non Sequitur.: "Lol I'm a chicken and i am delicious." When someone completely changes the subject to something that makes absolutely no sense, they have lost the argument.

Straw-Man: "Just because the game has bugs doesn't mean it's going to fail."
This is oftentimes not relevant, as the poster being cited did not say the game was
going to fail. This one is a bit complex, its the act of changing your
opponent's position to one you can more easily attack.

Evidence that MMO forums are becoming more considered places? Not a chance, but the seven pages of comments (at time of posting) are themselves an interesting read. That said, there is an argument that while on the one hand the Community Managers may be happy to see rational critical debate taking place, theres a benefit to keeping the proles in an endless, pointless, irrational battle (whats the MMO designer saying? "when they're all screaming at the same level, you know you've got balance right..."). After all, the last thing you may want on your Community forums is articulate critical thinkers deconstructing your game, giving a rigourous argument against acceptance of game flaws and bugs, and generally analysing everything which is said by the designers with an evidence based, sceptical, lens.

Though, wouldn't computer gaming be different if the Community Forums were full of such comment?

They'd be worth reading for one thing!

History of MMO's Videos

2011-12-01T01:08:00.000-08:00

I'm stealing liberally from Raph Koster's latest Blog update here, but he's posted a few links to some very interesting (and surprisingly well considered) Youtubes on the History of MMO's which I thought was worth reposting. Raph's website itself is consistantly very good ( I have a link to it under "Required Reading") and always worth a look.

Online Community Management

2011-10-25T03:50:00.001-07:00

One really interesting recent articles on Gamasutra recently regarding Community Management which are well worth a look at. "The Evolution Of Community Management" is an interesting recap of the journey that Community Management has taken over the last decade or so from "forum monkeys" (the articles words, not mine!) to part of long term relationship building. Linked to this is an interesting short piece on how "How Community Management Is Like Dog Training" (sounds awful, but it's not as bad as it first appears!). Also an interesting counterpoint viewpoint here that "A community is not a customer". In other parts of the internet, the free section of the GDC Vault continues to deliver, with some really interesting videos/slides here, here and here. And also here!

Hugely epic changes as Blizzard allows RMT...

2011-10-11T09:46:00.000-07:00

... Or perhaps not. While many forums of the internet practically bleed as players vent over this. Despite my normal verbose response to things like this, I have a simpler explaination.

Welcome to the bottom left hand side of the Boston Matrix. Trust me, it's better than the game being in the bottom right hand corner.

Price Points: EA SWTOR and Sony DCUO

2011-09-26T03:13:00.000-07:00

I'm sure I'll be blogging much more about EA's recent announcements regarding the hotly anticipated Star War's MMORPG, but certainly one of the first points I wanted to make was about price points, and simply how stupefying Sony's monthly subscription on their DCUO Freemium Pricing model is in light of yesterdays announcements. Don't get me wrong, Sony are right on the Free and "Premium" accounts, but wildly off base in their pricing on their "Legendary" accounts (i.e. a normal monthly subscription model).

EA on Star Wars upcoming MMO (Gamasutra):

A copy of the game includes a 30 day subscription, and after that, access costs $14.99 per month, $41.97 for three months ($13.99 per month), or $77.94 for six months ($12.99 per month). In the UK, subscriptions will be £8.99 per month, £25.17 for three months (£8.39 per month) or £46.14 for six months (£7.69 per month). European pricing will be €12.99 per month, €35.97 for three months (€11.99 per month) or €65.94 for six months (€10.99 per month).

Sony Press Release on DCUO (Gamasutra):

Legendary: Maximum features and benefits are included at this level. Loaded with enhanced additional features, Legendary access will be available for a $14.99 USD monthly fee and includes all DLC packs at no cost, more than 15 character slots, more than 80 inventory slots, the ability to form unrestricted-sized leagues, and many other benefits.

Hmm, so a game which is pretty much diving towards a Freemium business model, has pretty much decided to price itself at the very top end of the market (before the EA Star Wars announcement), a move and price point, which in light of the Star Wars announcement, becomes now quite ludicrous to sustain. I laughed loudly and shook my head in disbelief when last week Sony announced a $14.99 DCUO monthly subscription, now, barely a week later, that high price point is simply bewildering.

On the EA announcement, if anything, its pricing structure is lower than I anticipated, which is a nice surprise, and particularly the UK pricing looks very competitive. Truth be told, I'm sure they could have set the UK prices for this hotly anticipated product at £9.99 or £10.99 and no-one would have probably batted an eyelid. If the UK produces around 100,000 subscribers, that's not a huge monthly loss to them, but still, taken over a year, that represents an additional £1m revenue which they could have lost. Of course, that's obviously offset (you can tell I'm an accountant at times) by the additional revenue gained by people not unsubscribing because the monthly cost is so low. My research indicates that most monthly MMO prices are set so low on an hour's played to enjoyment received scale, that few gamers who have incomes really are that bothered about costs as long as they are within an "acceptable range" (and what constitutes that is obviously driven by their expectations, and what they're currently paying). It is only when money is a concern for the gamer or they are thinking of unsubscribing anyway, generally does it become a "halo effect" variable which affects (or infects if you like) their perceptions of price Certainly, getting the price points right is a bit like Goldilocks and the Three Bears with the marketing challenge of the customer (Goldilocks) finding your porridge "just right" a serious headache. In this case though, I think EA's Marketing team have delivered, and Sony's probably should be taking notes.

MMORPG and RPG: Can Modern RPG's teach MMORPG designers much more?

2011-09-14T08:14:00.001-07:00

With the roots of MMORPG’s being in Pen and Paper RPG’s, a great debt of gratitude should be left at the door’s the 1974 founded generation of Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) games started by Gary Gygax (Chainmail) and David Arneson (Blackmoor). Without their, and David Wesley's (Braunstein) additions to the genre (Braunstein moved us beyond model wargaming and introduced the concept of the character actually having a goal; who would have thunk it!), the concepts of hit points, class levels, experience points, armor and dungeons as adventure settings really wouldn’t have finally made their way into modern MMORPG’s. Snow’s (2008) must read summary of the development of RPG’s actually reads like a shopping list of concepts which we take very much for granted today. My point is, so much has been taken from the, forgive the expression, “trad” games of the 1970’s and 1980’s, and in particular that early genesis period of the modern RPG, can MMORPG’s learn from newer RPG’s? Are there any developments in the last decade in RPG’s that MMORPG’s could learn from?

I suppose it’s also equally a valid statement or proposition to ask the question; have computer games, many of which started life as simple replicates of pen and paper systems, reached the point now that they no longer need many of the things inherent to RPG’s? And indeed, are there elements of RPG’s still present in MMORPG’s which hold back the development of better MMO’s? In particular over the last few years I’ve been increasingly exposed to the “indie” RPG market, mainly due to a close friend becoming involved in self publishing and marketing of his own indie game. This has made me, particularly over the last decade, as a gamer who, to be honest in the 1990’s was a very much “Trad” gamer, become very aware of the quite innovative things which game designers have been coming up with once you depart (or, to be fair, take a slight de-tour from, 4^th Ed is a great game I’d happily play more of) the mainstream. Really my question is, can computer games designers, who’ve learnt so much from RPG’s early days, learn much from subsequent and newer developments?

To be honest, my first impression is no. Mainly because what computer games do well is translate hundreds of dice roles and hardwired system mechanics beautifully, with a graphics engine, to produce a quicker experience. Rolling a character in a pen and paper RPG takes an hour at least generally, a modern computer game like Dragon Age 2 or similar has you pretty much diving straight into the action within a minute or two. Then combat. If you think of how many player vs creature fights it takes to level up to exit the normal starting area in WoW or Rift, and how many quests are completed, that in a pen and paper D&D game would quite literally take days to reproduce. Computer games excel at taking a static rules system and crunching those numbers behind the scenes allowing players to do in seconds would could otherwise take minutes or hours. Why might more modern non-“trad” games systems (and I clearly differentiate systems from settings here, as indie games generally have some quite cool settings which computer game designers may very well want to play with) not be as much use to computer game designers? Well, mainly because they focus on player interaction experiences and storytelling. While a rules heavy tome (and there have been many of these still published in the last decade as well…) which defines everything a player can possibly do in a game setting is actually a good set of rules to follow for a game system, many “non-trad” or “indie” games, which have moved far beyond and away from the wargaming roots of RPG’s and attempt to produce a more dramatis persona or, to be honest, amateur dramatics, feel to the game. If I think of the most innovative RPG “system thingy” (technical term don’tyaknow) that I read lately, it’s the Coretex character interaction building system from Smallville, which I’m pretty much going to port straight into all my games; it’s not something however that you could ever apply to a computer game as it’s a story and player interaction system.

As noted though, new and modern most certainly doesn’t always mean non-crunchy! I’ve picked up some seriously rules heavy crunchy books, some of them even self published independent works over the last decade. Admittedly I’ve picked them up, flicked through, and quickly put back down… But honestly in some of these systems I’ve read about I do wonder if the RPG has much left to “teach” the computer game in terms of games systems. Certainly in terms of settings and worlds I can see a huge amount of possibilities, and I’d be ecstatic with a Shadowrun MMORPG etc. Is there anything beyond creative settings though that RPG’s have left to deliver? Or will current MMORPG writers, be the future writers of RPG’s? To say something quite controversial (to a very particular band of geeks like myself admittedly, everything’s controversial to someone on the internet…) even the “olde brand” D&D, in its latest 4th revamp, has taken quite significant elements that I, as a long time both role-player (since the mid-1980’s.. feel old now..), and RPG computer games and subsequently a MMORPG player can see rather interesting, well (how to say this in the least controversial way…), convergent or parallel “games system” themes in (in double dutch, I just said the controversial sentence that I think D&D learnt from WoW and improved their game as a result; GASP! NO!!).

BizBureau Coverage in Daily Mirror

2011-08-31T03:35:00.000-07:00

On the back of my article on social media in Real Business, our hard-working PR company Consolidated PR (all praise to Lottie Dutton!) have managed to get my words of wisdom shared in today's Daily Mirror in their BizBureau section. The article itself in the newspaper looks quite nice and compact, and they also have it on their website here.

Personally, I'm just about to pop out to grab 3 copies for posterity!

Grow your business with social media - top tips

2011-08-25T05:08:00.001-07:00

Small little article with my name on it here on Real Business regarding Social Media usage. Not included was my favourite Social Media campaign of the moment, Blendtec’s “Will It Blend” series which I think is an amazing marketing campaign. So, for posterity, I’ve put a one of their better Youtube’s below.

(Not) Leveraging Community, (Not) Cross-selling and cool looking upcoming MMORTS's

2011-08-16T13:55:00.000-07:00

After trying Rift for a while now (for purely academic purposes you must understand; I suffer for my scholarly activities...) exploring more about Trion Worlds usage of social media I stumbled upon End of Nations. By stumbled upon I quite literally mean I accidentally found out about it when I was researching how they acquired their last round of funding to produce Rift (some interesting stuff here and here to). Further exploration did find a sizeable amount of info about End of Nations, including a very well developed website for what looks on the surface to be quite an interesting game.

To use a lot of acronyms in a short sentence, End of Nations is an MMORTS, with strong PvE and PvP elements and which uses a F2P (no, really, I'm not making this up, it's like an arcane language for the un-initiated isn't it!) business model. It's from their announcements, a persistent online world, though as an RTS geared towards 50 player battles I'm guessing that it's going to be heavily instanced, presumably using ladder systems or similar to provide continuous challenges in PvP (though, Trion Worlds, and thought out PvP systems aren't words I'd put in the same sentence as of the time of writing this blog post...).

While that's all interesting in-itself, as while it doesn't invent a new genre or anything, large scale RTS games have of course been tried before, and the degree to which the game is instanced, which I suspect will extremely heavily edging towards near completely instanced, really makes the persistent world element rather questionable. If you have two teams (let's call them Destruction and Order), and you allow these players to meet in a PvP game through instanced Battlegrounds only, and you unlock various RvR content as the wins push backwards and forwards... is that a virtual persistent world? The RvR situation may change, and the game may give the appearance of being a functional world, but it's very far from that. An explorer player is unable for example to travel around the game world and watch the seagulls etc.

Personally, I'm not that bothered about the semantics of if the game constitutes a "virtual world" or not, I'll leave that to academics with slightly larger vocabularies (actually more often, in my experience, they simply have very large expensive thesauruses and an innate need to obfuscate simple matters with indecipherable language, but that's a different blogpost...) . The persistent nature of the world actually opens up quite interesting possibilities (especially when we throw social media, groups and clans/communities into the mix) and throws up some interesting questions. Will the world be completely open to attack all the time? I remember for example an acquaintance of mine explaining Dark Age of Camelot's RvR system and people ringing around to each other at 3am in the morning when they knew everyone else was asleep to assault an opponent's Castle/Keep . Or will, like the sailing naval game Pirates of the Burning Sea, will people only be open to attack at certain times?

While all interesting side issues, what really caught my attention was Trion Worlds use of social media, on the plus side; a community forum which gets regular traffic from game designers, good youtube and related video usage, reasonable blog mentions (if you look hard enough). All seems good. Until you realise that Trion Worlds also have a huge (ah... a very debatable word I'll admit!) MMORPG community which are hardly cross selling to at all. To put this in comparison, you just need to look at how hard Activision Blizzard are cross selling Diablo 3 to the World of Warcraft community, they are leveraging that MMORPG community as hard as they can to try and get Diablo sales though every outlet they have.... and on the other side Trion Worlds hardly seem to have mentioned to their players; look, cool new game, if you like Rift, and think we're good game designers, try this, it's great! I've scanned through the Rift website, I've looked through the forums, I've even had a scan of some old e-mails they've sent me. Nada, nothing, no attempt from Trion Worlds to cross-sell a game to me.

So I ask a simple question (or two): Why aren't they using their community better? Why aren't they leveraging and cross-selling better?

While I'm sure End of Nations's will at some point get some kind of cross selling action (the marketing team should all be sacked if that doesn't occur) the lack of even putting the game on Rift players menus for awareness this early is quite shocking.

GDC Europe 2010 - Dynamic Events in Guild Wars 2

2011-07-29T01:18:00.000-07:00

Was looking through the free section of the Game Developers Conference Vault, and found this rather excellent video by NcSoft on their Dynamic Events system, but the video also really covers a lot of questing, MMO history and development issues really well. A number of other great (free) videos and slides there to and well worth a look!

Social Media Company Valuation

2011-07-22T03:53:00.000-07:00

"Ecosystem economics"? I'll add that the the lexicon of pre-crash bad business ideas along with the analyst esposal (pre-dot.com crash) that you can value online companies on a "per-click" basis. Amazing how the head of tech investment firm can ignore that when Linkedin has a P/E Ratio of 1400 (....over 50 is considered a risky long term investment and around 12-25 is the FTSE 100 norm to put it in context...) thats a rather large unsustainable bubble (and soon to be crash) warning sign. Fortunately Rory Cellan-Jones seems to be a bit more sensible.

What interests me about this is, everyone with experience of the dot.com boom, everyone with a sensible business head, and indeed those more vocal bloggers out there already are shouting the word bubble, yet investors are still piling money in hand over fist. I think perhaps the worst thing I can say about this is; we're investing like it's 1999.

Steam Marketing & Building the Franchise/Brand

2011-07-04T06:21:00.001-07:00

If you had a great little game Alien Swarm, which has some quite good reviews, how would you best market it? It’s a nice little multiplayer co-op shooting tactics game… what? £20… £10… Or indeed… Free?

Well, free is what the makers of Alien Swarm decided upon via Steam, and with some searching it was quite easy to find the explanation of the game designers as to exactly why they were giving away quite a nice little game for free. Why? Some really good, very smart reasoning detailed. Key to this is building a brand and brand loyalty:

“It Builds Brand Loyalty Gamers like free stuff. Gamers also like good support. Releasing a game for free makes people love Valve (hell, it works for me). Valve also releases free content and support for past games, which leads to the same effect.”

What a great little forward thinking proposal, and so simple in concept to. A pity many top companies don’t have this level of recognition and self reflective ability. Simply put, being self aware enough to know: nobody knows us, we lack a brand or franchise, and there’s lots of established games out there for gamers who like this genre to put their trust into. What I like about this entire marketing approach (which I think a number of studios could learn from..) is its honesty with the customer, and its innate recognition that repeat custom, customer satisfaction and subsequent retention, is the only way to build the brand and/or franchise from the ground up.

It’s an interesting little promotion though. I’ve just come across the game today, however it’s been out for many months now since August last year, and the 50,000+ players online at peak times 5-10 months ago has (apparently) come and gone. However, Steam has now a specific section for its free-to-play games since June 2011, and this has led to Alien Swarm, and indeed another host of games, being more prominently displayed to users.

Why is that important? Because Steam is actually one of the biggest platforms in PC gaming, which worries some people, indeed, it has made many retailers very unhappy (to say the least), as they see it as a major competitor, but certainly to be listed as a free-to-play game on Steam gains a substantial amount of new players for your game. How many players? How much market awareness? Doesn’t seem like a huge deal…. Well around 1000% for Champions Online as a quick example in the last month!

Why else is this important? Well read this polemic by Matthew White a researcher from Memorial University of Newfoundland: “...repetitive, derivative commercial off-the-shelf games as a phenomenon posing dangerous implications for the health and viability of the video games industry, foreshadowing particularly a major crash or paradigm shift in the near future. Implicated in these predictions are the games industry's ignorance of player wants, needs, and individualities, the dangerous economic precedent of the generation of derivative works, and the evidence of gamer dissatisfaction through free and open gaming communities.”

Though the entire article is very worth a read in of itself, It’s sentences like “player-centred game development and participatory design” in the abstract which ring bells with how Alien Swarm seem to have taken their game. A game based out of the work of the modding community, a game which is starting from a base of nothing and building its franchise from player satisfaction, retention, loyalty and feedback.

So what might be the first stage of a new MMO company, designing a new franchise MMO costing millions in development? Well, perhaps giving away some of the content for free might be a, seemingly surreal, good first step!

DCUO: Green Vapour

2011-07-02T10:08:00.001-07:00

So I went to see Green Lantern today, a very silly movie, got home, and decided to look at the new Green Lantern DC Universe Online powersets for players in the game, which as far back as 2009 were being discussed. What new powersets would be a bigger question, nope, nada, nothing (fortunately I realised this *before* activating my account for a month!). A huge blaze of publicity in January 2011 promised this content to coincide with the movie. Worse, the powersets are already in the game, and used by a number of GL and Sinestro Corps NPC's, so the actual work is minimal. Oh well... Maybe they kinda missed the launch of the movie or something? Easy to do, you have a major DC franchised MMO, a major DC superhero movie come out, I can easily see why your website and content would be bereft of *any* attempt at a linkage... That'd be like... Marketing 101...
Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange

Bitcoin Collapse

2011-06-22T05:46:00.001-07:00

“The system has proved popular with online criminals, keen to keep their financial transactions secret, although it has a wider, legitimate, user base.” What an amazing phrase to use in a BBC news article, for those who don’t know, Bitcoin is where the internet and real money meet, but certainly not for the first time. Virtual Currencies have been with us, particularly “in-game” virtual currencies, for quite a while now. But a virtual distributed, and highly difficult to trace currency, for the sole purpose of real world item exchanges/trade? To quote one of the designers themselves; “A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”. Well, that’s perhaps not completely new, and there’s already some interesting thoughts on this here on SSRN by Reuben Grinberg and another interesting piece of work here by Constance Wells on the subject. But does it have criminal aspects? Well certainly some US Senators seem to think so in June 2011, though when you get behind that Reuters new story and actually read the real press release the US Senators actually made (always a good idea) you see they are actually wanting to stop The online marketplace Silk Road, which has been called the “Amazon.com of Drug Selling” and accepts Bitcoins as a major currency of exchange. (I’d use a few more authoritative sources normally I should add, but in these cases the sources are actually fairly good.). So this story actually has three main parts to it; (1) the existence of a peer-to-peer distributed currency with heavy encryption/cryptography which bypasses financial institutions and regulators, (2) the possible use of that currency on (reputedly) disreputable trading platforms involved in illegal activities and finally (3) the hacking/cracking of that currency and the subsequent fallout. While in-itself it isn’t a game based currency, the experience of Bitcoin, and I’m sure the regulatory actions and fallout, will throw a few question marks into the air regarding those games who currently, or want to in the future, employ a model which allows transactions of virtual cash to real money. So certainly this is something to keep an eye on with interest, and a story to keep track with.

Adventures in Customer Service

2011-06-15T02:29:00.001-07:00

What an interesting weekend. A simple trip down to London and back to see a few shows (the very awesome Wicked and Shrek) and some interesting customer service experiences along the way. Now, my friends who know me all are aware that I can be a little well, particular, when it comes to customers service. However I look at it this way; great service quality should be what all companies who want repeat business should be providing. If it’s not great, why should I return? I’d rather go/try elsewhere and hope I find better (I do get onto MMORPG’s and Rift towards the end of this blog post, I promise, I will tie this all together!)

I’d rather be flying

So, I started my Friday with a trip down the East Coast Mainline to London. I’d upgraded to first class mainly in the hope of being able to get chapters of a book read on the way down, and I must admit after having travelled on trains in the UK for many years as a student I’ve very low expectations of service quality on the UK railways. They never fail to disappoint either, and this was no exception. My train was 8am so all I wanted getting to the station was a cup of coffee and so upon getting to Newcastle station I was not surprised at all to find that the 1^st class departure lounge had its coffee machine out of order. Typical. The lounge was also unattended, and had clearly not been cleaned up after the morning business class passengers (the 5.56am train from Newcastle to London which gets them in for around 9.10am is popular) and very little care and attention seemed to have taken place to doing the basics like replacing the water bottles etc. Even the lounge itself was old and outdated. When you consider how much a 1^st class train ticket from Newcastle to London is (£150 anywhere up to £307 or indeed, more), you’d think that the hefty premium paid would at least allow the East Coast mainline to stretch to a flat-screen TV? Nope. I honestly felt ripped-off sitting in that lounge and the only (as a customer) thought in my mind was that the Servis-Air departure lounge at Newcastle Airport, where I could help myself to all kinds of nibbles and coffee (and indeed it’s not uncommon to see people rip into the spirits and beers at 7am…) all for the princely sum of £15 which you could add to a £80 (up to £150 if you book last minute) or so ticket to Heathrow. Add in the cost of tube from Heathrow to the middle of the City and you end up with a quicker journey, a better lounge service, and around half the cost. Bargain. No wonder so many people choose to fly rather than catch the train these days to London. This is a perfect case for me of where poor service quality is deservedly killing the business. It’s just a pity that as a UK taxpayer I heavily subsidise the business.

Adding the wrong sort of value

At least on the train it was slightly better. East Coast Mainly have at least woken up in some way to the fact that their premium customers can fly cheaper for better service and an in-flight snack to boot, and have started doing “complimentary” food on your journeys in first class. As a marketer it looks like a rather desperate attempt to add value to that hugely over-priced ticket and add in some extra price differentiation. Unfortunately while a smart marketer may have cottoned onto the basic principles of differentiation, they seem to have forgotten that as soon as you provide a service you will be judged on your ability to deliver that service. Now. Those of you who have read this far, with everything I’ve said so far about my railway experiences… Who thinks that the sort of organisation that can’t even get their departure lounge right will be able to provide a decent hot breakfast in 1^st class? Yes. You’re right, it was laughably almost stone cold. So a big yes for rubbery cold scrambled eggs on a plate, and a big no to actually adding value to the typical 1^st class journey if my experience is anything to go on. I was left thinking; is this just me? Or is this the UK, where poor service quality and execution is the norm rather than the exception.

Adequate experiences don’t make for repeat custom

Now, just to show I’m not all a customer service freak, the Hotel we stayed in just off Hyde Park was perfectly adequate to our needs. Nicely centrally located, just 100 yards or so from a tube station. Decent standard. Yes, they had one of their two lifts down, but let’s not get picky. The breakfast was so-so, but again, it’s only a 4 star hotel, I wasn’t expecting perfection. Adequate. Let’s explore that word more; sufficient, enough, passable, satisfactory and tolerable are the synonyms that Word automatically comes up with, and yes the Ramada Jarvis on Hyde Park is all those things. Adequate and acceptable. Not of course, anywhere you’d recommend to a friend, and certainly not somewhere you’d want to go back to in a hurry, as you’d rather take the chance in going back to London on a newer unknown hotel and hope that it’s better than adequate. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t special. It was everything I’d expected and nothing I’d hoped for. It had absolutely no Unique Selling Points, it had nothing to differentiate itself.

Awesome service quality gets you recommendations

So I went to see Shrek, and, yes, because it’s me, Ticketmaster sent the wrong dated tickets (that will be the subject of a really long and extensive blog post in the future I’m sure!). So I get to the Theatre Royal in London’s Covent Garden area to see Shrek: The Musical (It’s a great show!) and, quite rightly, I get informed that my tickets are invalid for that show. Now. Here is where our story changes. So far on this weekend I’d experienced the typical, poor or adequate customer service experience of the UK. Not so from the manager of the Theatre Royal in London’s Covent Garden, (who play Shrek: The Musical by the way, and, it’s fantastic). Despite our invalid tickets, they did their very best to try and seat us, and on the stroke of 7.30 as the show was about to start, they had us run up to an un-sold private box overlooking the stage, which they said they never sell because of a “bad view” (it was actually a great view, and I was about 4-5 meters from the actors!).

What amazing people at the Theatre Royal in London’s Covent Garden who show Shrek: The Musical (really; see this show!). Now, this was completely unexpected, and very kind of them. They were completely within their rights to say; “Sorry, those tickets you have from Ticketmaster aren’t valid for tonight’s show”. But they didn’t. They went above and beyond, and tried their best to resolve a problem they could have quite happily walked away from. By the way, did I mention you should really think of going to see Shrek: The Musical at the Theatre Royal in London’s Covent Garden? Yes. Oh…

And so from that weekend what do I take? To summarise all four points I’ve made so far;

· When customers have good alternatives, they’re going to compare your service quality to what they think they could be receiving.

· If you add any kind of service, you’ll be judged on its quality of implementation.

· Adequacy kills repeat custom.

· Customers who are extremely happy with your service quality are your advocates.

And so Rift

And so, as this is a Blog about online games, and I did Blog about Rift in my last post, lets return to my Rift experiences. It’s a perfectly adequate MMO game (do you see where I’m going with this already?). It’s… sufficient, enough, passable, satisfactory and (indeed, what a horrible word to use for an entertainment product) tolerable. It’s OK. It has no real Unique Selling Points as such. It does nothing particularly well. It’s graphics are.. acceptable to my expectations. It’s gameplay is… OK. It’s overall production values are… good enough. It’s no diamond in the rough however, there is nothing here in terms of an awesome product service experience which is going to make me an advocate of the game. The pity is here, there are some great alternatives on the marketplace, both in terms of what is already out there, and what is coming on the horizon. I’ve seen many MMO’s of this kind. Indeed, as a rather driftwood sequential customer who’s tried most AAA MMO games over the last decade now, I’ve seen this type come and go. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad game at all, the quality of implementation of many of the ideas is perfectly reasonable (and adequate…), and I do think that a number of other MMO’s will do many of the same things as it does, but it lacks (excuse the not so very fun in-joke for those who have played the game) soul. It lacks anything that uniquely defines it. For most games that uniqueness comes from the IP world. World of Warcraft has always had its unique IP in terms of the lore etc. Warhammer Online, Age of Conan… many of these games (good and bad) have at the very least some kind of uniqueness that adds to the customer experience and drives engagement. Rift? Well…

· Rift? It’s Adequate. Sufficient. OK.

· It’s certainly nothing I’d ever recommend or advocate to a friend.

· There’s a host of good alternatives.

· It implements everything reasonably, but nothing uniquely well.

Getting the Social Marketing Side On: Rift

2011-05-31T04:34:00.000-07:00

So I decided to check out Rift.

For purely academic purposes of course! Rift is a new MMORPG launched in March 2011 which, since release, has been able to suck quite a sizeable slew of customers away from WoW. Indeed, it’s been called by many a WoW-Clone for its similarities to WoW which I think it a very unfair attributation (and let’s not even start with the WoW is just an Everquest Clone discussion…). Indeed it’s not a WoW clone at all, it could only be called that by someone who hasn’t played another MMORPG apart from WoW in the last 5 years. It’s actually a Warhammer: Age of Reckoning Clone (WAR) (which itself was a WoW-Clone) with strong WoW threads stuck within it. With Age of Conan-like graphics. Indeed, if WoW, WAR and Conan had a love-child it would be Rift. From WAR it takes public/open grouping, fast and furious PvP battlegrounds and an interesting take on public quests/instances. From WoW it takes, well, almost everything else (and fortunately all it takes from Conan is the graphical look!)

It’s literally as one friend put it, as if a number of game designers who happened to be WoW players all sat down and went through WoW with a list and chose what they liked about WoW, and then changed what they didn’t like or didn’t work for them, keeping within the spirit of the game. So it keeps the gear based system which builds game capital and player investment (and thus buy-in), and it keeps the tiers of raid progression etc. But ditches quite a bit of the class based stuff in favour of a quite interesting innovative take on skill trees etc.

From the social and community side Rift developers Trion have wasted no time at all with social networking and web 2.0 integration. With Riftconnect you can play and update your Twitter, Facebook and even Youtube all at the same time. Kill a cool mob in-game? Screenshot it and upload it straight to your Facebook page or even straight upload your instance footage to your Youtube to criticise your tanks ineptitude. The social networking side is of a great fascination to me, and I wonder how many people have been drawn into the game because of seeing a friends Rift update on Facebook or Twitter and decided to try out the 7 day trial?

And on the subject of trials, yes, the game has the typical starter zone trial package, but also (very much like WoW introduced) it has all the customer-to-customer sales tricks up its sleeve as well. Certainly the designers seem to have skimmed the best selling ideas from their competitors with their recruit-a-friend scheme, which one friends of mine rightly pointed out is a very interesting take on pyramid selling. Recruit one friend and get a small ikkle bonus, recruit more and get unique in-game items etc. And all the “teleport to your friends side” etc socially orientated game design functions which you’d expect to go along with it. Is this the standard now?

The social networking side is, of course, just the start. Where’s the websites? Well, currently the fansites are building up. There’s quite a forum community and a fansites programme, but in many ways these are the basics. What they HAVE done really well, far better than any game since WoW is there use of Portal sites like Zam to quickly build online resources for players to use. A number of games miss this critical step (particularly WAR and Age of Conan) but there’s nothing better as a former WoW player than having a number of talent builders, skills explainers and resource search engines at your fingertips. Why? Because that’s what you’re used to! You’re used to being able to go to WoWhead and MMO-Champion and everything else you use as a resource. These online resources help the player feel that they’re in a well supported community. Not all players will be interested in podcast shows or having a constant feed of information, but in a sizeable community a number of them will, and what’s likely is that these people will be your most gamic-social (did I just make up a word there?) people. Your guild leaders, your class leaders in guilds who talk to and influence people to get them ready for raids etc. They’re your influencers and “game paragons” who create and maintain your games social capital structure, so they’re an important stakeholder you need to make sure are kept flooded with what they need (though not necessarily what they want; there’s a distinction).

So overall, a nice little game which has come a long way in just 2 months of release with the social marketing side of the equation. Let’s hope SW:TOR learns similar lessons from its predecessors.

Update:
Thanks to a reader for e-mailing me to remind me of the online Youtube campaign. Some great usage of vid's here to capture the imagination of potential customers.

BMAF Conference 2011: BMAF Paper Presentation on Online Blogging as a Learning, Teaching and Assessment Technique

2011-05-24T06:04:00.001-07:00

Went down to Bournemouth on Tuesday 10th May – Wednesday 11th May (First experience on Flybe… wasn’t too bad…) and delivered a paper on the use of Online Blogging as an learning, teaching and assessment tool. Overall BMAF was a great little conference, and as someone going for the very first time I generally found everyone who went as extremely positive, and I certainly gained some very useful feedback about my research when I presented it. Currently turning this into a paper which hopefully should be out soon.

Of the greatest interest to me at the conference itself though was a great little presentation on the use of Second Life from Suzanne Kane (“In-world team management activities: Team Avatar”) from London Metropolitan University which hopefully should be up on the BMAF past conference page soon. I’ve worked on a little project with students before using Second Life, were we were involved with the Tyneside Cyrenians and some of our Corporate Management students built an in-world “soup kitchen” (or something like that). Certainly, as I said to Suzanne Kane on the day, I think “live projects” of that kind (particularly charitable ones) are great learning vehicles for students. That said, I still hold out hope, one day, that we’ll be able to teach the basics of management though an online MMO game like SW:TOR or WoW (Hey, a guy can wish can’t he?).

... The International Journal of Role-Playing?

2011-05-23T05:45:00.001-07:00

What an interesting find on my digra news roll; The International Journal of Role-Playing! With some really interesting articles in it as well. Including a great one about the stereotypes about role-playing gamers. From an MMORPG perspective though the most interesting article was one by Dr. Christopher Paul & Jason Pittman, both from University of Alabama who looked at Role-Play In Table-top Gaming and World of Warcraft. Their results are both unsurprising and confirmatory to my own experiences

“The imagination and open-endedness of table-top roleplay is a dynamic that is often stifled in WoW.”

“online gaming comes with the notable cost of losing complete control of the game world, which increases ease of play, but dramatically decreases feelings of ownership about game play.”

In other words, not only do you lose the pure creative spirit of many role-playing sessions (which cannot be replicated by anything requiring pre-programming), because of that, your sense of shared ownership of the game is also decreased.

Anyway, it’s certainly an interesting little journal that I’ll be keeping an eye on (and have added to my “required reading” feed) Alas, unless I have some great undergraduate students next year who want to do role-playing game orientated research (and produced a good paper) I can’t foresee myself trying to publish in an unranked journal of this kind (who knows I could be lucky…) But it’s certainly a readable publication (abet an unranked one) and looking at the editorial board, which includes Richard Bartle and a host of other worthies, it’s actually surprisingly strong from a peer reviewed editorial perspective.

If only it was ranked at least 2 star in the ABS ranking lists of dooooom… <sigh>. Honestly, whilst I understand the need to have some kind of system for understanding research output quality, I do feel newer and more off-the-wall journals get crushed (particularly in the UK) by this “league table” approach to REF-able submissions only.

Customer Retention?

2011-05-19T05:25:00.000-07:00

One of my students pointed this (a bit old at 2006) video out in his undergraduate dissertation to me, and I must admit, given my frequent adventures in Customer Service, I'm astonished at the lengths this AOL salesman goes to.

Weirdly the video and experience itself has become a meme on Youtube with The Rock and Christian Bale (very rude, but very funny) parodies, and there seems now a whole host of videos on Youtube of people cancelling their accounts, credit cards and so forth now, showing clearly the sometimes outrageous blocks put in their way.

I'm not sure I have a point here, certainly on the one side, you could argue, that the salespeople at least tried every possible thing they could to retain that customer and stop them leaving the company. On the other hand, the sort of negative publicity this in-itself could bring.... Is it worth it?

Would I give the guys at the other ends of the phone medals for their services to Customer Retention? Or the sack for going over-the-top? And especially when you impliment sales targets and retention bonuses to motivate salespeople (I know of at least a couple of companies where if a customer comes on the phone to cancel and you persuade them to not cancel, you get a cash bonus) is this what you end up with?

Just how deadly for DC Universe Online and the industry as a whole?

2011-05-14T06:06:00.001-07:00

Evil has triumphed, Superman and Wonder Woman and the host of DC Comics storylines have been crushed in the online realm.. by Lex Luthor you ask? Nope, by some quite non-speculative fiction people with real world criminal intent. Now, and for about a week or so Sony's Playstation Network has been crippled and in particular it's MMO games have been hardest hit. Is this the end of the (DC) Universe as we know it? Puns aside, it's a huge blow to the design team and programmers of a game which (if internet rumors are to be held to be true) was not blazing with success post initial launch. Already a server consolidation was being proposed, and now the servers have been off for some time. Perhaps even the industry as a whole may be hit.

What does this all mean? Well certainly from my research this would seem to be quite a critical period for Sony. Their subscribers have had the initial buy-in of trying the game and are making that critical decision as to whether the game is worth continuing with. Importantly this also creates a huge decision point for them regarding their value for money evaluation. Many MMORPG's do well in removing decision points (automatic re-subscription being a great tool in this), and for good reason, at every decision point you introduce, you're going to lose a swathe of customers. The game being offline for a long while now is going to make people re-evaluate the buy-in and their subscription (even with the free month Sony is giving away as compensation). Worse still for Sony, particularly the more hardcore gamers out there have probably already moved on to new pastures (Rift) or games they're know well (I'd be fascinated to know this month's re-subscriptions figure for World of Warcraft!).

And this is all ignoring the large elephant in the room of many people's Trust in Sony being rather shattered. Customers will of course react to this in a very individualistic way, but generally you'd expect those with large "sunk capital" in Sony products to be more forgiving than relative newcomers (this being the internet however, I readily expect to see a video of long term customers spitting on their PS3's...). Hardest hit of course will be the newer customers of the new products (DC Universe again) who have little built up trust and capital, and have insufficient ties with SOE to be as forgiving.

Can it get worse? Well yes, it can. Already a number of fan forums and websites are talking about some "Justice Leagues" etc (the DC Online version of Guilds/Super-Groups/Corporations) moving on-mass; in many ways MMORPG's a very much confidence products. If we have the confidence that the game is going well, and I have a lot of people to play with, the game will do well. Without such confidence I'm worrying who I'll game with, and if I'm playing a "dead game" and when the servers are going to die. In other words, the community can actually self-cremate very easily the game they love though sustained negative output. More importantly they can kill the "newbie hose" which most MMORPG's survive on in some way though such bad reviews/news (interesting I’ve found that CCG’s can work in very much the same way!).

My prediction? Either very late this year, or in the 1st quarter of next year we'll see DC Universe Online (which I think is a graphically great game by the way, and I really did enjoy it myself) go F2P (Free to Play). Especially with the competition from forthcoming superhero games like the future Marvel game which is rumoured to be built around the Free-to-Play model (then again with the Marvel MMO so far off, Marvel may just be opportunistically putting some heat on the burner regarding this due to Sony’s issues; Champions Online is a much more solid F2P issue). A free to play model for DC Universe will certainly rebound it's subscriber numbers and with the highly instanced nature of the game would probably work well for content/micro-transactions payments.

And that's just last week's news.... with Square Enix (Final Fantasy)being in the next today for similar attacks on their databases to what's hit Sony, is this going to be a trend? Consider the impact for example if EA Bioware and their Star Wars MMORPG got hit by what's happened to Sony in its second month of launch. How many subscribers would they lose? Could they ever hope to recoup the reputed $300m of the budget?

Huge commercial issues here, and indeed, the possibility of corporate espionage.

What? You think I'm dreaming here? Joking? If you have the knowledge that you can cripple your major competitors huge multi-million dollar project with some minor hacking actions and drive transient customers back to you as a result, it's a tempting possibility. Certainly I've heard of hugely less destructive acts that major corporations have undertaken against competitors over the years, ranging from the minor such as the recent Google and Facebook issues over a PR company and privacy concerns, to outright bribery, bugging and hacking.

Great recent news story on this can be found here on the BBC news site:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13251608

And I've dropped some similar stories below as well:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12125864

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7220063.stm

And a great overview of Corporate Espionage here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4595745.stm

..... a partially successful experiment...

2011-05-13T15:53:00.001-07:00

Trying to get it all tied together as a single media platform has been partially successful it seems. With an e-mail I’m able to update my Blog, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin all simultaneously, however the Academic.edu (which seems honestly to be the poorer, less developed child of social media at the moment) doesn’t seem as well connected. Which is a pity, because as a social media platform to reach the professional academic community at large, I feel that it has huge future potential. Unfortunately it seems currently to be rather “under construction” at the moment rather than completely sorted. They do have a bit at the bottom of their webpage where they (perhaps desperately) are asking for engineers to help them out, so perhaps theres an opportunity there for someone reading this.

I’m slightly amused that firstly, it’s taken me so long to get around to this (I’ve been meaning to have a single platform arrangement for an age now, just never found the time… the marking made me do it… I’ll be cleaning the house next or something…) simply due to the fact that I’ve always known how to do it, and bearing in mine my research area, it’s always seemed rather embarrassing that I never found the time (there’s the nature of PhD time-sinks for you). Secondly the considerably more amusing thing for me is that the arrangement, the glue if you like, which holds this particular single platform arrangement together is Twitter. I despise Twitter! I have no use for it, yet, it’s the glue between my Google Feedburner (Thank you Google for such a beautiful free app) and my Linkedin and Facebook accounts.

As an academic I find that an interesting issue (hey, is there a research paper in that, or at least an undergraduate dissertation for one of my students I wonder?) how many people like myself don’t really use Twitter beyond it’s “glue” ability to link to other social media platforms? Is someone who has a Twitter account, but is merely using it to put together their various social media platforms REALLY a Twitter user? Well, both “of course”, but from an advertiser’s sense, and a marketer’s sense, no. As a marketing platform as a company, I’d be interested in numbers, but I’d also be interested to learn that possibly a (Sizeable? Small?) number of Twitter users never really check their Twitter accounts at all. I’d be interested to know if this is an issue at all. Potentially Twitter could have quite grossly inflated Marketing importance as a Social Media Platform is lots of people use it like I do.

A (Possible) Brave New World of Social Media Interaction

2011-05-13T15:18:00.000-07:00

So, I upgraded my phone today, but along with that (and to hopefully get the most out of social media in general) I've decided to see if I can get everything to work together.

This is the concept... (sing the song of hope with me!)

The email's connected to the... Blogspot..

The Blogspots connected to the... Google Feedburner....

The Google Feedburner's connected to the.... Twitter...

The Twitter's connected to the.... Facebook...

The Twitter's connected to the... Academic.edu

It's never going to work is it! Oh well, the plans of mice and men and all that.

Game On

2011-05-03T06:00:00.000-07:00

A nice little piece about my research in this months Inspire magazine.

If I had my time again...

2011-04-14T00:54:00.001-07:00

We're just about to go to advert for some PhD's on http://www.findaphd.com/ (which of course I'll add when the advert is up!) , but scanning through various different institutions adverts it was frankly interesting to see what was out there right now, and it got me thinking what I might do if I had my time again. The one that caughtmy eye was "Sanctioning mechanisms and the formation of collective patterns of behaviour in a multiplayer virtual online gaming community." which when you read the ideas behind the PhD and what they'll fund you (yes, fully funded! I was amazed too!) sounded great:

Specific aspects of the investigation will include: the emergence of friendship and co-operative dynamics (the incorporation of players into groups such as game ‘guilds’, for example) and the related aspects of trust and co-ordination; the emergence of internal etiquettes (i.e. ‘chatiquete’ and rules of online communication (Merchant, 2001; Bordia, 1996) and the sanctioning of saboteurs and the violation of ‘norms’ (Smith, 2006); analysis of conversational dynamics characterized by a lack of embodied non-verbal language cues (Manninen & Kujanpaa, 2002) - that is, an analysis of how these dynamics amount to social phenomena emerging in virtual realities (Curtis,1992; Jones, 1995).

That said, University of West Scotland? Well, it may be just me and the sheep, but since I'd only (in this insane world of doing my PhD again) be mainly studying computer games again, I'm sure just a strong broadband connection would see you through those 3-4 years of your life.

PhD Thesis Online Publication

2011-03-29T06:27:00.000-07:00

My PhD thesis has been published online in the Northumbria Repository here.

I'm still pulling together a paper based on this, which I'll probably be trying to write over the Easter period. Certainly I hope to have something in the works by the end of this summer at the latest. A few target journals in mind, but if anyone wants to drop me a line regarding their particular journal happy to discuss.

Immersion

2011-03-23T03:46:00.000-07:00

A great article on the psychology of immersion in video games (with some snazzy pictures too) written by Jamie Madigan, the man behind a great blog on the "Psychology of Video Games" can be found here:

It raises some really interesting issues. In particular I like the idea of "the fanboy gene" that it presents. One of my favourate books is "The Elfish Gene", which could be the story of a number of people I know's lives (and somewhat my own!). This idea that some people, through their experiences, are simply drawn to certain products more isn't of course a new one. No-one is going to be winning any prizes for saying that geeks are drawn to geekish things after all. But I do think there's something to be explored not only about the emotional investment concept in the article, but also how that concept is driven or encouraged by the nature of the gameplay experience.

Law and Punishment: Maximising Advantage or Exploiting?

2011-02-14T06:10:00.000-08:00

The gaming discussion over what an exploit is, and why players use them has raged over many an internet forum. Usually with absolutists from both side weighing in, usually with examples of Godwin's Law being evidenced in great amounts. I was shocked to learn the other day that I apparently exploiting in DCUO. Really, me, I was shocked too!

One of the powersets in DCUO (Sorcery) has a pet summoning ability were you summon an ikkle eye which follows you around. When in Healing mode, the ikkle eye heals, when in damage mode the eye attacks your foes. However, and it was pretty funny when I noticed this, the eye is bugged. It retains the abilities of the role you were in when you summoned it first. So you can summon it in a healing role, switch to damage role, and effectively glide through the solo content as a high DPS killing machine with a personal healer. This, to use a technical MMORPG term here, is BA-ROKEN! I can see the point here, while it may be extremely fun for the player to stride through the game solo and pulling large packs of mobs hammering out vast amounts of damage, I’m obviously belittling the solo experiences of other players by doing so… Apart from the fire powerset players of course, to whom walking through the game as self healing high damage AOE monstrosities is the norm.

So... In short... I broke the rules because a game designer messed up somewhere and the game engine ain’t clever enough. And it is obviously my fault, completely my fault, that this occurred. How should I be punished? Should my account be disabled? Should a bug which has never been reported to me before suddenly mean my hours of investment in the game get thrown in the bin by the company? The Terms of Service and End User Licensing Agreement are explicit after all, I’m an exploiter, and deserve to be punished.

More seriously, just how do, or should, you punish your paying customers as a company for breaking the rules in an MMOG? How do you make sure the paying customer isn’t so upset as to cancel their subscription? Or do you just ignore all that and see the “bigger picture” and accept the loss as part of maintaining a working MMOG game? Is this just the stuff which “happens” when you try and maintain your rules within an online environment?

A good attempt to bring together the various stands of what cheating or exploiting really is can be found here in the Proceedings of DiGRA 2009. The article defines cheating well, but isn’t as detailed on punishment. Another article here, talks about the problems of taking action, but again, isn’t that detailed. The legal framework has even been examined in detail, but seriously, what sort of company wants to punish potentially paying customers? The problems are pretty awful!

Maybe me just feeling bad about it will be enough?

Educational Games

2011-02-11T08:13:00.000-08:00

I don’t often Blog about my role at University or what I’d like to do, but sitting on the Metro today, reading a few academic papers from Constance Steinkuehler in particular (yes, my life really is *that* interesting!), I started to imagine what could be done, if my imagination was left to run wild (the dreams that dull teaching academics dream huh?), within my role at university. Constance’s papers are firstly well written and some amazing ideas are contained within them, and her website is a must read and follow for me. The basic premise that runs through Constance’s papers is that people learn and develop from whatever activities you have them perform. For example, in terms of learning students how to search for information and instilling the idea that this is important and instilling the motivation, how do you do it? Do you give them a dull and boring task like an assignment, and tell them the need to display the academic research skills? Or do you first build these skills with more interesting activities like searching for information regarding a computer game they are playing, so by the time the individual gets to an academic assignment its second nature to start searching for more information.

For me and the role I play at a Business School, the question is can these virtual third-spaces, and the environments which they create be used to build and develop transferable leadership and management skills? Leadership and Management skills are a difficult area to effectively teach in a classroom setting, as they are generally practical interaction skills which only improve through use, rather than discussing the theory of an approach. So allowing students semi-structured environments in which they can practice these skills to achieve goals and then reflect on their abilities would be a very useful teaching tool and method.

Not for one minute though am I advocating simply playing computer games like World of Warcraft or DCUO to examine these skills. Instead imagine that you had an hour’s lecture on leadership in a classroom, then had a classroom based seminar where you went through a case study, AND THEN you went online and for a couple of hours practiced these skills in leading a small team towards an objective, AND THEN you spent time writing an essay or reflective statement in which you reflected on how your personal skills were used, in relation to what you learnt in the classroom, in that online environment. Not for a minute would I suggest that just playing computer games themselves would teach those skills, but a fluid combination of classroom based theory and practical based experiential learning followed by reflection could take place, and that would be effective. That’s certainly what Constance Steinkuehler would argue from reading her papers anyway.

Unfortunately I then started to think of the problems. Firstly let’s throw away the idea that within a UK university framework this could be practically done without research funding or corporate sponsorship. The first problem is technological in the fact that if you did this within a module/unit, you’d need to be assured that all students had equal access at all times to the resources. In other words you’d effectively need to turn a computing lab into a computer gaming café/hub and probably would need to sign internet café style licenses etc. and incur significant costs in doing so. In the modern world of finance constrained Higher Education this wouldn’t feasibly work unless you could possibly get a corporate sponsorship partner or external academic research funding. If you could get a corporate sponsor partner who was willing to work with the university on developing leadership and management practical skills, and they were willing to fund the project to perhaps gain skills benefits for their own staff, then it may have legs.

DC Universe Online: Part 2

2011-02-07T05:57:00.000-08:00

I feel that I’m having a go at DC Universe Online with two consecutive posts about what they did wrong, and I’m actually looking forward to posting about the many things that they have gotten right, including a fantastically visual marketing campaign which suited the product brilliantly, and the excellent use of online community marketing to get the message across to the relevant publics. However, one of the problems I have with DC Universe Online (apart from the successes I just mentioned) is the failure to get the simplest parts of the modern marketing game right; getting the buddy codes in the boxes!

Who made the decision that buddy codes only go in the Collectors Editions? I mean seriously, who? The marketing team I’m sure, as SOE hires a smart bunch of people, probably knew full well that that decision was a bad call, which probably means the decision was made at a more senior level, probably by a person who really doesn’t have a grip of modern online marketing of computer games.

Buddy codes get are an amazing marketing tool for selling MMO games, why wouldn’t you use them? The question isn’t usually about limiting the number of them; the question should be how do I get my players more Buddy codes so they can persuade their friends to sign up? Referral marketing, work-of-mouth marketing and leveraging your player base to turn them into your extra sales team is possibly one of the most powerful ways to build an MMO player base. Given SOE’s experience in the MMO market I’m first aghast at this decision, especially given their MMO previous experience, and then surprised at the speed at which they’ve responded to the community… Well if “responding” is just ignoring people that is.

Imagine for a second, your customers are asking, indeed in some cases begging on your forums, that you give them a (very functionally limited) trial account code so they can try and get all their friends to play your product. And then imagine… for some jaw-droppingly and mind-boggling reason, you actually ignore these pleas from them to sell your product for you. Seriously? Why would you do this? SOE have the email accounts of their users, they could e-mail out a trial account buddy code to everyone today, a freebie, recruit your friend. Please sell our product for us… But no.

For an MMO game, social capital is key, my research confirms this and gives me numbers on just how key it is. But even without that research and number work, it doesn’t take a genius top work out that in a massively multiplayer online game getting players to bring along their friends can only extend the life cycle of their subscription, and possibly give you new subscriptions.

Given how good the first 10 levels of content are for the product as well (which the trial account limits players to) why wouldn’t you? DCUO is an astoundingly good product which has graphics and gameplay unlike anything out there at the moment (and a chat system which needs serious work… but that’s for another blog post). A friend of mine who did try the game on trial was very impressed (yes, yes, my sample size of one astonishes you I know…) and certainly everyone I know who’s tried the game so far has been quite taken with the visuals especially.

Is it due to the console aspect? This can be my only thought as to why. Obviously console PS3 games cannot have buddy codes and cannot have trials in the same way as the PC version. However, would the PS3 purchasers be that concerned that they don’t have the same freebie buddy codes as PC gamers? I’d be astonished if anyone could give me evidence that they do or would be.

Given the other (very good) aspects of the marketing launch, well, it just seems a lost opportunity.

DCUO Review: Part 1

2011-01-21T07:05:00.000-08:00

DC Universe Online so far has had a relatively (in MMO terms) smooth launch. Despite some very variable reviews, including ones which I personally feel are so off-base they might as well be on a different planet, generally the action MMORPG has been well received, despite criticism (unfair perhaps, but certainly something to be listened to) that the game is merely a direct console port. I won't disagree that certainly the console side has clearly impacted on the games design. But I personally feel that if you're going to take the cross-platform approach, which for many games companies is the ultimate holy grail to be honest, a subscription MMO game that you can hit PC users AND console users with, you're going to have to at some point hit compromises between the platforms. Sony so far in the pre-launch phase, the launch itself and the now post launch phase have though some issues, and certainly some things they should also be praised for. The things they need to address and the challenges they've set themselves are, in my eyes, the community communication strategy, the on-going content pledge, the RP servers, the buddy code issues (only if you get a collectors edition? What?) and the poor chat system implementation. They should be praised and remembered for though running an outstandingly visual based pre-launch marketing strategy, creating a game which has some amazing production values and producing a high quality action-based MMORPG (admittedly, on the near horizon many more action MMORPG's are heading our way and it has been attempted before, but this games certainly embeds action better than most).

The Community

I remember reading a WAR developer talking about why they weren't having forums, he said that the reason was that they wanted the PvP and bloodletting to be in the game between characters, not on the forums between players. Certainly forums can be like this, though thankfully DCUO's forums haven't become the Age of Conan collective primal scream pages that I remember. One issue with the forums, and the community management in general at the moment as I see it though is the lack of engagement with the various extra-game tribes (the mechinema tribe & the modding community in particular, but not exclusively) who surround the game. In a way I can understand this approach, and it is perhaps a limitation of the technology being cross-platform that they can't open up the UI to modders, and perhaps a limitation of the IP that they can't effectively encourager mechinema, however I feel that a trick is being lost. These types of tribes are really the enthusiastic vocal product champions for the business, and I'm a little surprised that no real engagement strategy has been implemented.

On a related note, the forums are simply old fashioned, and the platform they are currently using looks better suited to Everquest in 2001 than DCUO in 2011. When you look at Blizzard's recent upgrades to their forums you quickly start to see what I'm talking about in comparison. Why no role sub-forums, why no server forums? These are MMO community forum basics that the community expects, and SoE have so far been very slow to look at.

Finally, where's the community strategy to encourage a metagame of DCUO websites? Facebook, yes. Twitter, yes. Youtube, yes. But where's the community strategy in place to encourage players to blog about their experiences? Build websites themselves and build communities? Nowhere. Which I think speaks volumes about how they are approaching the internet PC-ing community.

The game is clearly from a marketing perspective, from what I can see, a console based platform in which the PC gamer is the additional money-spinner, rather than the other people are trying, of creating a PC game and cross-platforming it to the console. The ignoring of building a internet PC community speaks to this.

This isn't a deadly criticism of course, merely an observation of the choices they've clearly made. If other games companies decide to tread this path will be interesting to see.

LeWeb 2010 Conference

2010-12-10T01:07:00.000-08:00

I’ve been keeping track of this for a while now, and while I couldn’t go, there’s been some interesting reviews coming out of the conference in both the news here and here, what really caught my eye was the level of community engagement, with an official bloggers programme, which I was hopeful about, unfortunately is full of quite poor quality blogs (so much for internet blogging being the wave of "new journalism"). So I've been forced to keep an eye out in the dead tree press news here and more web based news here.

How interesting though that some of the best, and most informative reflections and information on LeWeb 2010 is actually found in the Wall Street Journal. Who've some great video interviews and fantasic review pieces.

Definately all worth a look, read and watch for anyone interested in the industry. And kudos to the WSJ for such great coverage.

.

Researching From Online Communities Social Networks and Websites

2010-12-07T00:25:00.001-08:00

I recently put together some materials on some of the issues of online research (particularly in online communities and social networks) and I thought I'd share, as a few of the students mentioned that they found them useful. This is also an excuse for me to gain a bit more knowledge of Scribd to be honest, which I've been part of for quite a while, but never really used.

Researching From Online Communities Social Networks and Websites

Customer Inertia, Customer Responsiveness, Customer Differentiation: Letting your customers choose to pay more by self selecting.

2010-11-02T08:54:00.000-07:00

In most major metropolitan cities they have some kind of mass public transport to get around, in London they have the Tube, a Victorian built, rather smelly and dirty system of getting around. In Newcastle we have the Metro (run by the company Nexus), a similar idea but it only has two main tracks that basically cover the Newcastle surrounding region to the east of the city on the north and south of the tyne. By and large, the system runs mainly to time, though the carriages are definitely showing their age, and indeed, there’s been a lack of capital expenditure in general in the rolling stock (that’s trains to most people) though admittedly there has been some expenditure on one or two of the main hub stations like the new Haymarket development.

I use the Metro every day. I hate the Metro. I love the Metro.

Why do I love the Metro to start with, well, for me at any case, it’s a nice walk down to the Metro from my house. My local station isn’t too bad, smelly or horrible, and while you might feel occasionally that it’s a bit of a violent place, it’s that sense of ready to erupt violence that only Daily Mail readers of a certain middle class persuasion usually have. I’m sure any American readers of this Blog from New York would find my local Metro rather charming and quaint in comparison, as while the youngsters in hoodies at my local station play-act at being bad-ass, I’m sure most of them are all tucked up in bed by 9pm. They’re feral, but only in the way that a house broken cat is feral when it’s out and about, and turns back into a cute little tomcat when it’s back home wanting some milk. Anyway, back to the point. Why else do I love my local Metro? It’s a nice trip to work. I always get a seat as I’m at the end of the line and it’s a nice 35 minute trip almost straight to my place of work in which I can happily read a book or newspaper.

Why do I hate the Metro? Well that’s simple. For every bit that I love my easy morning trip to work, I HATE my evening trip. It’s a sardine can. Basically between 4.30pm and 6.30pm if you’re on a Metro that’s going to my end of the line it’s horrifically packed at peak times. Beyond the obvious of why I hate this, what I REALLY hate is the lack of response you’d expect from almost any other type of business. If the Metro company Nexus was any other type of company it would simply increase the number of trains at peak times to respond to customer demand. But no. As the timetable for Haymarket shows, trains run every 12 minutes at daytime and peak times, in other words, they’ve made no increase in trains beyond what they normally have for peak morning times. I hate this, any other type of business and I’d be long gone.

So what did I do yesterday? Despite my reservations, and my almost certain knowledge that the sardine can phenomenon is going to get worse, I renewed my Metro pass for around £450 and, like any good little accountant I worked out cost to myself, based on how many days I’m in work etc of around £2.14 a day return, £1.07 each way. That ain’t bad. Whatever my hate side of the equation, whatever issues I have with the Metro, I simply can’t get into work by car or bus cheaper than that on a per day cost. So I set myself the test of: what would actually make me change? I’m unwilling to change to another mode of transport at £2.14 as it undercuts a car by a vast amount. If I wanted to buy a car and drive to work even a small £12,000 Polo + on costs + petrol + parking is going to make the daily trip around £31 in total costs (Now I can tell I’m an accountant at heart!). In other words Nexus could, quite possibly increase the cost of travel to me by a factor of 5 or 10 per day, and I’d still happily pay it as it would still be cheaper than the alternative.

And this is what really riles me about public sector businesses like Nexus. Any other business. I’ll say that again; *any* other business, faced with this, would see the perfect route to letting customers pay more: simply introduce a premium or first class seating area and let customers self select how much they’re willing to pay. Let your customers differentiate themselves for you as a business according to their preferences. This is Business Marketing 101. If you have customers who are able to pay more, and have significant issues with packed to the gills trains like sardine cans, why not introduce new rolling stock which has first class/premium compartments and allow those who are willing to pay more to opt out of the sardine can? Let your customers vote with their feet, and allow those who want to choose to pay more to avoid the crowds do so. I’m sure there’s a reason they haven’t done this so far, probably to do with the cost of new rolling stock to start with (which, as I’ve pointed out though, desperately needs replacement anyway though!), and the cost of financing that expenditure. But I see it as such an easy route to more money for Nexus. Why wouldn’t you, when you have 20 year old rolling stock, not choose new trains which allow you to differentiate your customers and charge higher costs for a more premium product?

I Love the Metro, I hate the Metro. And I’d happily self select and pay an additional couple of quid a day to be able to overcome my hate part as a customer and have a nice premium class seat to read my book in on the train home.

Launch Wars: Coda to The Art of Timing the Product Launch

2010-10-05T08:36:00.001-07:00

This is maybe a neat little coda to my posting about Activision Blizzards delaying Cataclysm, but DC Universe Online have just announced a delay to their much publicised and committed to November launch date. Again, the advantage is obvious to do so. DC Universe Online was going to launch in November and had actually sold quite a few pre-orders already. Now, they get all the benefits of picking up in early 2011 all the dis-satisfied and disheartened Cataclysm players who, a few months after launch, will be wanting their "next big thing" (TM).

As much as I praised Blizzard for delaying their (rumoured by quite reputable sources) November launch to December, I have to similarly hugely praise Sony marketing execs for biting the bullet and delaying a marketing engine which was just about to launch into full drive in the next few weeks by many months to be able to avoid the Cataclysm death-knell that launching a month before Blizzard's huge product would have brought.

They've, at the very least, given the game a chance. They've also shown that they're quite willing to play the launch game quite well, and realise that the costs incurred in delaying their game a few months is quite reasonable when compared to the otherwise potential outcome of becoming road-kill in front of the Cataclysm machine.

Is this just the start of Product Launch timing "wars"? We already see it with the launches of major movie studios "blockbusters" when studios strive to make sure they aren't clashing too much with each others huge releases (The fallout of the "Jurassic Park" vs "Last Action Hero" will forever be embedded upon movie execs). Is this the start of similar in the games industry, an industry that already borrows so much from it's movie industry cousin?

The Art of Timing the Product Launch

2010-09-29T00:28:00.000-07:00

Blizzard Activision are once again showing that while they are game makers, they also have some people at the company with business acumen. They already, very carefully a few years ago, dealt with the absurdly mis-represented “wow killer” launch of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR) with the timing of their expansion launch a couple of months after WAR, and now they are up to their old tricks again with the delay to their current expansion in development: Cataclysm. The reason; well, you may feel I’m reaching here, but first consider the costs and issues that delaying, one month before launch, a huge retail product like Cataclysm must bring. The disks and retail products will have already been made, and will currently be sitting in a warehouse (costing millions), the company has incurred the production costs (costing many millions), and the marketing machine is ready to roll, the TV slots will have been booked months in advance, as well as the magazine adverts etc. This has to be done on a schedule. Blizzard have just inserted an extra month into that schedule; why?

Pre-Expansion Blues

Well, before we get to the “why” first consider the typical pre-expansion player base. They’re bored. The content is done. The dragon/lich king/wicked witch is slain, and re-slain, and re-slain again. The game is done, and customers are looking to the expansion with awaiting and longing gazes. Indeed, they actively follow sites such as MMO-Champion and watch Cataclysm Beta videos in their literal millions. They want the new. They want the shiny.
And so, what is occurring in November? A new and shiny thing. DC Online. A huge IP and brand. A game which will have a large draw from the very bored customers of World of Warcraft, and a game that, in November, will have a huge marketing machine going into full gear. Back to the “why”. Why would you incur millions in costs to delay your product a month, after all, a month isn’t that much time is it? To demolish the opposition.

Pyrratic Victories

Successful launches which gain hundreds of thousands of customers are great in MMO terms. But the most important time isn’t launch, it’s the month after launch when those customers need to re-subscribe. Blizzard knows that they’ll lose many customers in November to DC Online. That’s a known quantity ( a known known to use a Rumsfeld-ian), the question is, how do they make sure, deadly sure, that their customers will return in the droves (and, nicely ram a whole in the side of DC Online), well, they simply launch the month after. World of Warcraft customers, will go and play DC Online, and they’ll give Sony Online Entertainment many millions in retail box sales. Those same customers will, by and large, very quickly return to the December launch of Cataclysm.

Congratz!

So well done, in advance, Activation Blizzard. Congratz. You’ve, though incurring millions of costs in delaying your launch, probably and successfully scuppered DC Online. DC Online will launch in a blaze of glory, and then suddenly the holidaying World of Warcraft customers will all leave after their free month and return, in joy, to your awaiting arms.

Making a great product is one thing, understanding how the market works and timing the market like Blizzard are doing just shows how they’re in a different class business-wise.

Where marketing hype meets reality for the first time; Betas as Marketing or Betas as Development tools?

2010-09-22T00:57:00.000-07:00

Only on the internet could you give free an unfinished, poor quality and frequently failing advanced version of your product to a customer and expect them, for free, to product test for you, and point out areas for improvement. Only on the internet would customers sign up in their thousands of for the "privilege" of doing this. For MMO computer games, and software in general, there are a number of phases of development. You have your in-house Alpha versions. These are the versions of the product that the company keeps to itself and generally has only its own quality assurance people working on. This has been extended in some cases to include small and controlled amounts of reviewers, drawn from either reliable sources, or sources close to the company; Blizzard's Friends and Family Alpha for example. Abet, given the leaks that come out of the Friends and Family Alpha it may as well be an open beta. The next stage is the controversial one (and the main point of this post). The closed beta, usually followed by an open beta. I say controversial as the exact purpose of the closed and open beta's is very much a subject of debate. A closed beta is where you allow a controlled number of selected people (usually including leading Bloggers, reviewers and internet personalities that your marketing team has decided to target) to view an advanced version of the game, usually under a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). An Open Beta allows a very large amount of people (usually with a limit on numbers though) to test the product and give feedback.

The Beta is an important turning point in the marketing process. Before the Beta your marketing team was working on building expectations and potential customers. They were the all knowing, all seeing founts of knowledge about the product. For the interested party, the only information they could glean about your product was what the marketing team allowed them to know. In other words, before the Beta, the company had a complete grasp of the flow of information and the control of information. The beta changes this completely. Even company which imposes an ironclad non-disclosure agreement will probably find a few days after going to closed beta a few Youtube videos have been posted showing people exactly what the graphics and gameplay quality is like of the product, and reviews will be posted around the internet which will then be re-posted again and again. Information control is lost very quickly, and the marketing team suddenly is faced with community management issues (whether they want them or not!). Indeed, at the time of the closed beta, the community management strategy may not even be fully thought through or considered by the company, after all, the product may still be 6 to 9 months from launch.. well, too late! The moment the product goes to beta (closed or open) the interested customers, whether the company likes it or not, will be flooding websites and social networks with information. The company without a community management strategy or team in place at this point, is one that has lost all control of information.

Now, Betas can be done right, and we should learn from when it goes right. The original World of Warcraft Beta was a huge word of mouth success that led to huge pre-order numbers beyond even what Blizzard Entertainment expected (or dreamed) of. And what's more, that beta was in fact a genuine development beta. It was buggy, frequently crashed and had serious gameplay issues. Indeed, one could say much the same about the 2004 launch product, though rose tinted glasses seem to make most WoW customers seem to forget just how bad the game client was at launch. Even now, Blizzard seem to be able to use their beta effectively, and the current Cataclysm beta is indeed, a beta. Though I would completely agree with anyone who pointed out that the beta for the expansion of a successful product should maybe be considered separately from the beta of a new launching product. That's the good, now with the bad. APB and Realtime Worlds, the recent Icarus of the MMO world, had by all accounts a disastrous Beta. The reviews from leading bloggers were terrible about the product and instead of generating a word of mouth sensation even their own internal employee's acknowledged that all the beta managed to do was to turn the most dedicated customer base the game had off the game.

The beta's are places which the most hardcore and dedicated of your fans will probably try and go to. A side note on what I'm constituting as a "dedicated fan" here but, though they probably don't think it, anyone who has played WoW continuously for over a year is what I'm classing as "dedicated" here. Generally I've found WoW players astonished when I mention that the average churn rate of a WoW player that Blizzards own legal documentation quotes in 2007 is around 3 months, which slipped out in the WoW Glider court case... considering I'm currently at 6 years, that's a little more than 3 standard deviations away from the mean average! Getting back to my point though, it is the most interested and possibly dedicated customers of a product who generally will sign up for a beta. These are the people who you've already, effectively, sold the idea to. The marketing team has gotten through to these people, and not only are they your beta testers, they're also the (hopefully) future advocates or (at worst) vocal toxic commentators of the product; whether the company wants them to do this or not!

And I think it is that last comment which summarizes my point best. Whether the company wants it or not. Even if the company sees beta as development. It isn't. It's where the marketing buzz crystallizes around realized experience for customers. Customers who will, despite any closed beta NDA's you impose on them, communicate their experiences far and wide. I fully understand why game developers might absolutely hate this, even despise this. But to not acknowledge it, or to try and ignore it, in the modern business environment, is like believing that by wishful thinking alone you can make water run up a hill instead of down. Modern reality is that a beta is an extension of the marketing function, and possibly the most disastrous betas have been when company's fail to acknowledge this. By all accounts Realtime Worlds went to beta very early in the development cycle; far too early. The beta dragged on for month after month and their client was shockingly bad, and they turned off their future potential advocates. If the beta had been controlled by the marketing function rather than the game designers (as, I would argue, it should be) then I couldn't see this happening. Game designers might again, rail against this and argue that it isn't fair that what's a product testing phase has been turned into a marketing push, but again, honestly, they need to acknowledge reality.

So what's a good beta in my opinion? Well, I'll admit I'm a defensive soul at heart. World of Warcraft's beta has an amazing word of mouth run-away success, but it would only be a fool clouded by hubris, or indeed a marketer who had been, to use an American marketing term "sucking his own tailpipe" (believing his own marketing hype) would expect the same. Also, the current and highly successful Cataclysm beta is not a good indication of how to run a beta. An expansion beta is nothing like a new products beta. Lessons instead (and unfortunately) need to be drawn from failures of the limping current MMO's like Warhammer Online and Age of Conan (which had a terrible beta) and again, from the warming remains of APB (and the stone cold remains of Tabula Rasa). I think the best lessons learnt from betas in MMO games is from the failures. In other words, looking at how not to do it. Some might question this, and those blessed with a market leading, ground breaking new product which is almost assured to have a successful beta may first wish to take off those rose tinted glasses, and then ignore the next few points. Those who are more realistic may want to consider further.

A good beta:

1) is ran by the Marketing Department rather than the Game Designers,

2) has Community Management in place and ready to fire-fight and control information at the start of the beta. For closed beta's with NDA's these people should be scouring places like Youtube constantly and getting videos taken off. It's not a solution; but it's better than doing nothing!

3) has a willingness to pull the plug on the beta and end the marketing exercise if it's a failing in its primary marketing job. ("we've decided, based on community feedback, to take on board all the very good suggestions our testers have given us and improve the product based on this") If you have a failed beta; don't try for a second one. Just internally test and launch.

4) Is short and sweet and at the end of the development cycle. You want a blaze of interest and publicity, not a drawn out funeral march.

5) Beta's should be only with almost finished products, and the major gameplay elements and particularly the graphics should already been checked and re-checked in-house. Beta isn't for checking things, it's advance product testing for the customer. If the game designers cry at this, ask them to buy and install a copy of APB and give you a review of it. Oh wait....

Re-examining the 3:7 Ratio

2010-09-17T06:41:00.000-07:00

As APB closes its doors, after less than 80 days, a game which had truly awful reviews and blog posts made about it as a game, I’m starting to consider that the negative cumulative impact of information might be just as worthy of consideration as the positive. I usually, indeed, marketing in general, usually, considers the typical marketing hype machine that most products use; the spending of millions on trying to generate a buzz regarding the product, in a pretty linear way. Product + online marketing money = more sales. This involves viral marketing videos, social media, specifically targeting leading blogs with free product and so forth. In other words the marketing machine those who are either familiar with online games, or are researching the area, are generally familiar with. The forward gears are well documented in their success; but what if you slip the clutch and put the marketing hype car into reverse? I’ve read about some of the great marketing disasters before (New Coke). But sometimes the speed at which customers in the internet age seem to generate a word-of-mouth death-knell for a product reminds me that, as fast at the positive top speed of modern marketing is, the internet also allows for toxic product or service information and brand damaging information to be transmitted with equal speed.

One of the best known ratios in service quality and marketing is the 3:7 ratio. Studies have shown that the typical customer who has a good experience will tell three of his friends, those same studies show that the typical customer will tell seven of his friends about his bad experiences. It’s a great inditement of typical human behaviour isn’t it, and says a lot about what people like to talk about. Anyway, some of the most interesting things I see is the way in which the internet and social media completely change that ratio.

At the recent Social Media Conference I was at an attendee was telling me about how Dell had an issue in that, at one point, if you put the search word “Dell” into Google, the top hit was their corporate website, but the 2nd hit on the search was “Dell Hell”. This was very angry customer’s blog, Dwight Silverman, which ranted on about how bad Dell’s customer service with him had been. If you know anything about how Search Engine Optimization (SEO) works, you’ll appreciate that the sheer weight of people going to the blog to read his rants must have been enormous (apparently near 3m people read his blog post entitled “Dell lies, Dell sucks”) to power him to the No 2 slot. Did Dell respond, yes! Funny enough, they even went as far as employing the blogger as a consultant for their customer relations department, indeed, this could be a success story of good customer relations (or, at the very least, damage limitation!)… but I’d rather look at it as the power of the slighted customer to spit back.

With the huge increase in internet-capable smartphone usage, and statistics showing that over half the internet usage on smartphones is social media based, I think it’s easy to see my case. If I had a bad customer service experience with a company, I’d probably make a status update on Facebook about it and suddenly we’d have my entire friends list (about 80 people) knowing about this. And that’s just a normal Joe Blogger. Imagine if Stephan Fry Twittered to his half a million or so followers that he found a certain product had poor service quality, and they re-tweeted about his tweet… and… well, you get the picture. This works for all sorts of products; particularly holidays I’ve found. Many of the lecturers I know use a website called Tripadvisor. Before booking a holiday I always check Tripadvisor and read the hotels reviews and generally, on the weighting of the number of stars people given it, you can get quite a good idea of the sorts of things to expect. I can just imagine the horror of the travel and tourism industry at the concept of literally millions of people reading all those (sometimes truly awful) travel reviews and making their purchase choices based on those.

Perhaps it’s time to re-examine the 3:7 ratio in the modern era.

Reflections on Social Media Workshop @ Northumbria

2010-09-14T10:13:00.000-07:00

An interesting afternoon of reflection for me on social media. I say reflection, as I actually took nearly nothing away from the workshop that I didn't already know, but, importantly, even for a non-entry level social media user like myself, I still felt that I took something useful away from it. Certainly, as an event, it was most definitely aimed more at people who had, I feel, very little current knowledge of social media. This was I feel unfortunate, as the people in the room seemed both very aware of social media and its impact on their businesses. Indeed, they seemed like a very switched on bunch all-round, one or two of which probably could have led the workshop rather than be sitting in the audience. To be fair, it was a good event, the speakers where first-rate, and confident in their knowledge and they (as someone who knows a thing or two about how to give a talk) I felt managed to build a good rapport with the audience pretty quickly; which is always an important step in transmitting information when you've got an afternoon slot and the audience looked like a bunch of intelligent professionals (trust me on this!). So overall, I can't fault the individuals from Say Consultancy & Harlands who gave the talk. I did however feel that the audience could have been streamed a little better. They had a morning slot and an afternoon slot, and probably streaming their audience into entry level users and more advanced level users would have helped them as presenters get their "pitch level" a little more accurate.

Overall what it did do though, getting back to my original reflections comment, was to get me to think about both my own projects, the university I work for's projects and external business projects in the light of the entry level business talk. I think sometimes I take for granted modern online customer relationship management. Perhaps it's the products I've been mostly researching for the past 5 years now, the $30bn industry which is online games, and the way these companies, and their customers, have embraced online social networking and the online media in general so wholeheartedly. It's actually an interesting perspective to sit back and reflect for a while at just how leading edge what they do actually is. Indeed, it's the community building and consumer tribe building exercises which started in online based products which are now filtering though to the marketing managers and brand managers of leading companies. Of course, as always, some companies are way ahead in the field, indeed, some companies with real world products could put the social media activities of online based companies to shame; there will always be exceptions. But it's always interesting to sit back and reflect and realized that effectively I've been looking at the bleeding edge of social media practice for so long that I'd actually forgotten that what I was examining was the exception rather than the norm.

Indeed, the fact that at Newcastle Business School we've appointed an E-Learning Teaching and Learning Coordinator at a Principal Lecturer Salary also perhaps was something it's sometimes useful to stop and look at. At the time, perhaps I thought "oh course, that's what university's do" and we have several Facebook and online based projects including Blogs, podcasting and media work related E-learning on-going. Again, perhaps if this workshop has done anything, it's made me stop for a moment and appreciate how advanced we are as a Business School. Both in terms of what we're teaching the students, and in what we're using in both our assessment and teaching. A commitment of a full time E-Learning Coordinator (in both time and money) is something which is easy to forget is really significant, especially when you're sitting on the edge of blogs, social media and large scale community management and just expecting everyone to catch up any minute.

When you look back at the start point which many businesses face from the perspective of my having researched hugely online and very social media active companies for so long, you start to see the cliff face that these companies are perceiving. It's not a lack of intellect, nor skills, nor resources. It's more that they're still asking the fundamental questions like "will this make me money" and "what's the risk to reward ratio here". This is while the companies I'm used to have not only asked these questions, they've also answered them, and have the hard evidence in terms of cash and market share which proves that a commitment to online social media, communities and marketing does work.

So overall a useful afternoon. Always good to have some time to reflect.

The MMO “metagame” and consumer tribes: If you can’t grow your own nick someone elses

2010-09-03T03:54:00.000-07:00

An interesting statistic always leaps to mind when I start to consider the “metagame” that being Nick Yee’s (2006) statistical finding that the average MMO game player spends 10.8 hours each week performing game-related tasks outside of the game. Be that just checking web-resources like Wowhead or MMO-Champion, listening to “Blue Plz!” or “The Instance”, watching “The MMO Report” or “The Guild”, or, more likely, spending hours on their guild website both signing up for various events and discussing the merits and de-merits of certain approaches to both talent specs and boss fights. I have literally witnessed in my time four and five page forum threads over two talent specs which we’re 95% the same, and two posters arguing bitterly (with increasing levels of evidence) that their allocation of the remaining 5% was more optimal than the other persons.

The metagame. The stuff players do outside of the game, which relates directly to the game. Where the consumption tribe that surrounds the game come out to play.

What’s a Consumptive Tribe?

Cova and Cova (2002) introduced in a very evocative phrase into marketing; the consumptive tribe. I’ve blogged about this before and It’s not a spectacularly new idea, and for years marketers have used such words as “customer support groups”, “fan groupings” and so forth. However I find the wording very useful to create imagery with my students. The effectively said that certain products or services create customer groupings surrounding the product who are very involved in the domain of the product, far beyond which we’d normally expect. These customers are joined together by the act of consumption, the act of buying and using the product, and from this joining together the company has (by either intent or by luck) created self sustaining communities, or tribes.

To give a few examples, I’ve personally seen and been a part of many different consumption tribes over the years. I used to play Magic the Gathering in my younger teens, which is a game (hugely profitable and surprisingly successful) collectable card game in which player’s first buy and collect the cards and then play and trade the cards. The consumption activity of playing the cards is heavily supported by a competitive scene in which tournaments and large scale card related activities are held. There in an innate link here between the consumption act of buying the cards and the consumption activity of playing the cards that brings the customers together. Interestingly, in many different types of activities, ranging from football club support, Harley Davidson owners to sky diving, the power of bringing your customers together to reinforce both the consumption activity (i.e. getting the customers to buy more) and their belonging to the tribe (i.e. getting customers to remain with the brand or product longer, increasing retention) has been both noted.

Piggybacking and sticking like a limpet

This obviously doesn’t work for a whole host of products and services easily. Take my TV cable provider for example. Virgin Media have a lot of customers who all have the same consumption activity (watching non-terrestrial TV, using the internet, making phone calls) and yet it would be very difficult to bring these people together as a tribe. There isn’t a natural (or indeed, designed/engineered) coming together of the customers. That doesn’t mean an understanding of Consumer Tribes is useless to them though. Indeed, understanding the needs of a consumption tribe like “”World of Warcraft” players (and I’m using BIG PICTURE, BIG CRAYON words here, as anyone who knows the area well knows that I’ve just made a very sweeping generalisation) could be very useful. Imagine if Virgin Media decided to offer specifically “World of Warcraft” UK customers a “free for 3 month” upgrade to their 50meg connection speed. How many BT “World of Warcraft” customers might be tempted to switch? How many current Virgin customers would try out the offer and then, at the end of the free upgrade period, not downgrade again? How much free advertising would they get on the internet from message boards and such like spreading the word for them?

While a product or service may not itself be one which lends itself to creating its own consumer tribe, but by identifying and accessing relevant consumer tribes which could either surround or could be applied to your product/service potentially you can access these tribe and enhance your customer base or achieve at the very least greater awareness amongst customers. Cova and Cova in their original 2002 paper for example discuss how a established sports apparel company Salomon specifically in 1994 onwards started to target in-line skaters and the skaters scene (I know, who would have knew?), with the company piggy-backing on their consumption activities. From this they were able to increase their turnover by 15% (It’s a great paper by the way, well worth a read).

Meshing the MMO Metagame with the Consumption Tribes

If you go to a major MMO gaming website, what do you see? MMO Champion, a hugely popular news/informational website completely dedicated to Activision Blizzard’s World of Warcraft is filled with advertising for specialist gaming hardware (gamers like their tech), dating websites (gamers are mostly male, and statistically I found 58% currently aren’t in a relationship) adverts for other games like EVE Online (MMO gamers are more likely to try other MMO games than non-MMO gamers, so some good targeted advertising there from that smart Icelandic company! ). A quick trip over to Curse.com, a very well travelled community website, and a computer hardware company Doghouse Systems is running a competition to give away a hugely powerful gaming PC, a competition which nicely highlights both their brandname and the fact that their PC’s are amazingly powerful (which will almost definitely resonate with the target audience). A trip over to Wowhead, a rather bland database site, but still massively travelled, and I find adverts from BT telling me how much I can save on my phone bill (always something a gamer might be interested in). Listen to popular podcasts and you’ll find that they are either sponsored by a certain company (Doghouse Systems for “The Instance”, again. UGT Ventrillo Servers for “Blue Plz”) or a service relating to the consumption activity.

Conclusion

What does this tell me? It tells me that this may be an area in which practice is rapidly out-pacing theory. Consumer Tribes and the specific targeting of them by companies is an area marketing teams are clearly actively and robustly working on. I don’t completely agree with everything Cova and Cova say. They try, very hard, in their articles to define their “tribal approach” as something that goes beyond “relationship marketing”. Frankly; tosh, utter tosh. While I appreciate why they attempt to do so from an academic perspective (indeed, I’d probably do the same) “Tribal Marketing” is clearly very much about identifying, developing and nurturing relationships with potential customers, in other words, relationship marketing. They’ve carefully re-packaged the concept of leveraging your potential customer base and understanding opportunities, and indeed provided a great framework, but it’s relationship marketing not a “new” discipline. But hey, again, if it’d been me, I would have probably tried the same thing to get my name in lights too, so I can’t complain too much.

Contribution in MMO Gaming Research: Answering the "SO WHAT?"

2010-08-31T06:36:00.000-07:00

What a piece of research adds is always the most crucial question that any person wishing to publish either a paper of a PhD, or, to be honest, any type of knowledge in most settings, needs to answer. It's the key "so what?" question, of as I like to think of it, the cocky chavver question of "yeah? and?". If a piece of MMO research can't answer the "so what?" question with a robust answer about how it adds to the current literature in some way, it is going to find it extremely hard to find both credence and acceptance from peers, publishers and PhD examiners.

"an original contribution to knowledge"

Now most types of research add something, it is implicit when you submit a paper for publication that it adds something. To look at that sentence in its parts, first original contribution does not mean Nobel Prize for Physics or enormous change to entire discipline. Some ikkle bits of research are capable of this, and some PhD thesis, notably Likert's 1930's one for psychological measurement have indeed been break-thorough. For most of us mere mortals though, our contribution is going to be much less significant, but hopefully it will be novel or original and it will add in some way. The three types of contributions which are usually of interest here are Methodological, Theoretical and Practice contributions.

Methodological Contribution

A methodological contribution is where you have either added to the knowledge regarding a research method or you have tried something original with a research method or approach. Unless you are doing something truly different, usually methodological contributions aren't huge, but they may be present.

Theoretical Contributions

Theoretical contributions add something to the current knowledge. As some person once said to me, if you imagine the biggest book (100,000 pages+) possible which contains absolutely everything about your discipline, your paper, phd or work has added something to that book.. possibly though just a paragraph in page 57,723. BUT what a paragraph it is! You’ve added something! And, hey, it could be a footnote! Again though, the SO WHAT? question comes to mind though, you’re addition must survive that cocky chavver with an attitude problem.

Practice and Managerial Contributions (Or, what you hope they are)

These are usually difficult, as these are generally what you hope that you are going to add to practice or managerial know-how with the outcomes and findings of your student. Here the SO WHAT question becomes more of a SO WHO? As you’ll have to clearly identify the users of this type of information, and you’ll want some vague kind of credibility to this “who”. A vague hand-wavery of “managers” might not be enough here, and particularly a PhD student may want to be able to name people or parties who he/she has had discussions as “proof” of professional interest in a viva.

Usually the practice contributions are the implications of what you have found for practice, and you should have a good idea of how this practically relates. Basically turning conceptual conclusions into what they mean for practice. Research papers or theses which have very business focused research questions can expect this to be the main crux of where their contribution is assessed.

SO WHAT for MMO Research?

Well so far in MMO research perhaps the biggest so what has been from the business community at large. As I alluded to in my “Why Study Virtual Worlds?” post there are those in the video game business community in general who currently cannot see much of an answer to “SO WHAT?”. That isn’t particularly an issue for those papers, thesis or research pieces who have non-applied research questions. Indeed I’ve read over the years some great sociological and educational research pieces of work which have no business application whatsoever (or, at the very least, no immediately viable one). That’s great, if your research question is orientated in that direction.

For other papers and other thesis though, particularly pieces which sometimes “claim” that they are focused on helping or engaging with business, sometimes that “claim” is both tenuous and vague. A vague, “this will help managers… well.. if they read this” is never going to rank well against “I have contacted managers in the business field and they have expressed an interest in looking over the findings of my research once it is published”.

Methodological and theoretical contributions have a different objective ranking, but unfortunately one which will only be clear in hindsight; how often will they be cited by fellow academics. It’s a horrible system and thing to say, but if your wonderful research paper or article is never cited by another person, probably it added very little to the field.

Realtime Worlds: Blogsphere runs Wild!

2010-08-29T00:58:00.000-07:00

I've been wondering for a while now whether to blog or post about Realtime Worlds and their demise as a company. It's an interesting tale of hubris, groupthink, dysfunctional investment behaviors based on past performance and, at the end of the day, a poor product launched in a poor manner. Indeed, it is so poor than many people are already calling it the worse MMO disaster ever, yes, even worse than Tabula Rasa (which sold OK at box stage) and a number of MMO flops.

The point is though that the Blogsphere, particularly a number of the MMO business blogs that I already follow have actually done a decent job already. When the news broke that Real Time Worlds was laying off people, a number of bloggers started with Blog posts decrying the modern game building business model. Quickly news started to leak out about the scale of the issues though (4th comment down), and barely scant hours after the leaks started the game was up: RTW was in administration. Now, for some in the SNP this was a time for political points scoring attempts, but most people who knew the score saw straight through this in the analysis. Realtime Worlds didn't fail because of a lack of tax credits, they failed due to a poor product which wasn't well received by reviewers or players. The post-mortems have been quick to arrive with some great analysis to be found here, here, here, here and indeed, here. I'm honestly unsure of what to add. It's going to make a great case study regarding investment though (or indeed how not to invest!). What I'm starkly reminded of is actually the 1997-1999 phase of the Tech company boom years where millions upon millions where splashed by Venture Capitalists and investors in general on poorly thought out businesses and business models. At the investment stage it seems some people saw MMO and probably thought "I must be in at the start on the next World of Warcraft money-train". I mean, GTA sold well. Exceptionally well, and now the former lead designer on GTA is standing selling me what is effectively an MMO version of one of the most successful console games of all time.

"What could possibly go wrong?"

Oh dear. $100m gone in a poof of smoke and a game with seroius gameplay issues which I feel the administrators will be very hard pushed to sell on given the reviews of issues coming out of the game at the moment. Word to the wise, reviews containing words like gankfest, aim hacks, wall hacks, huge exploits and completely unbalanced are NOT words you want to be seeing. I honestly don't expect APB to limp on for very much longer, and, given players are generally quite smart and can see the way the wind is blowing, I expect most of the current players of APB can see this too and will quickly jump ship to a game which does suit their needs, leaving the company with the problem of a rapidly vanishing player-base in a PvP game which actually requires lots of players to survive.

My post-mortem on RealTime Worlds? It's difficult. APB was and is, a dying dog of a game by all accounts. Given the amount of people coming out the wood-work from the company many people on the inside knew this to be the case and were deeply fearful of the games reception. As a product, it has deep flaws and in the end, it's these flaws and the poor reception by players of these flaws, which have killed it. I don't think it launched to early, it's not another Funcom Age of Conan problem, I think they could have been another year in development and still the game would have the same fundamental gameplay issues. Frankly, I think they completely misjudged the market with the business model and they produced a poor product. Both these things killed the game. The business model put off a number of players who potentially would have bought, but the real killer is that they produced a lemon of an MMO. Harsh, but true. The issue is here, if they'd sold a box with no after box-sales revenue stream (like NCsoft often does) they might have gotten away with it. But, they had the mill-stone of that $100m hanging around their necks. They were fully dependent on re-subscription and people remaining with the game. Not something which is going to happen when both the in-game experience is poor and the online noise about the game is so terrible.

Not a terribly insightful or deep and meaningful conclusion then, but certainly a pointed one for MMO designers. Launch with a poor product and look and see what happens. APB will be remembered for many years in MMO design classes, university financial investment classes and human resource management college classes. Unfortunately just not for the reason RealTime Worlds probably hoped for.

Used vs Newly bought: Mind boggles at THQ

2010-08-27T06:27:00.000-07:00

THQ thinks buying used console games is the same as pirating, yes, I laughed too. Buying used = stealing from their pocket.

Now. I like books of all sorts, ranging from academic titles to speculative fiction to graphics novels. In the course of owning significant amounts of books, I occasionally lend books to friends or colleagues (THQ would be horrified at that concept I’m sure! Stealing possible sales from book publishers!). For example today I lent two marketing books to a colleague; I’m also borrowing a number of graphic novels from a friend who’s gone over to Boston for a year. While I like buying new, occasionally I like to wander around used bookshops (there’s a great one in Alnwick) and peruse. Used books aren’t a great thing in my life (I don’t actively hunt through charity shops or anything) but when I come across a good used bookshop, or I got to an outdoor market (or the Sunday market at Tynemouth Metro station) you can generally find me perusing the book section.

I’ve also bought used Nintendo DS games. Why not, they are basically cartridges (they remind me of 1980’s Atari games in fact) which are very hard to accidentally damage, and they have absolutely no gameplay difference. The difference between a new copy of Brain Training for DS and a used copy is literally nothing. The game is literally the same, the experience will be literally the same. My friends normally joke at my love of the luxury at times, but even I’ll draw the line when there is literally no difference between the product. Indeed, my local town of Newcastle has seen the phenomenal growth of used console games retailers. Grainger Games when I came to Newcastle in 1999 was a small one man band in the Grainger Market. It quickly grew to open extra stores in the (now demolished) Greenmarket next door, and quickly opened stores across multiple locations in the north east. It’s a north east retailing success story, but a success story built mainly on a business model of re-selling used games. Used games are something which in the last 12 years I’ve just seen as the norm in console gaming. In PC gaming I’d never buy a used game, but in console gaming - of course!

The main thrust of this post is my complete inability to understand THQ’s recent announcement which is effectively introducing anti-reseller technology into the console market. This despite there being a very strong case to say that the ability to re-sell your console games on to buy new games actually helps the new games market. No, not just speculative blog posts, or just plain common sense depicted by Penny Arcade, actual empirical research. Work-in-Progess research by a PhD candidate I should add (because I'm pedantic like that) but Masakazu Ishihara's examination of the Japanese Video Market (which is VERY highly economics based I should add) gives us at least some evidence. To skip to the important bit:

The result shows that on average, the elimination of the used video game market
reduces the total revenue for new games by 5% if video game publishers do not
adjust their pricing strategy.

And thats 5% in Japan where they have a love of the new. In countries like the UK which has a huge second hand market, where indeed most high street stores like HMV have a large used section of games I can only imagine that percentage would be much larger.

I’ve got to ask if THQ’s marketing team has taken leave of their marketing senses. When this gets around, and it will get around very quickly in this wonderful internet age we live in, people are going to be very aware that THQ products have a very low resale value. The possible result? People who would normally buy a THQ game to play for a few months and re-sell on may now avoid that game with the THQ symbol on it now and instead buy something else.

I literally cannot understand their marketing approach; I suspect that some kind of doomed management group-think is behind this rather than smart business sense.

Sampling MMO Game Customers: Representativeness and Generalisability Issues

2010-08-26T07:19:00.000-07:00

Every time an election comes around people are continuously amazed at the ability of election pollsters to predict the outcome based just on a few thousand responses to questions. In the last UK elections IPSO Mori were only about 2% wrong on their polls, which, when you consider they were on average, sampling only around 2,000 people from a 35 million voting population isn’t a very bad margin for error. Of course, if we were talking medical science and whether or not a drug had fatal side effects, I as a patient would be rather concerned at a 2% margin of error. Indeed, in this case, I’d be rather upset if the medical researchers hadn’t taken a very large sample indeed, with very tight statistical tolerances on what they examine. The key things about sampling are these: we want a sample to be representative of the population so that we can start to generalise our results to the population. Much in the same way an election pollster with 2,000 questionnaires can consistently generalise to the entire voting population.

Unfortunately representativeness has a few issues for online researchers in general, and MMORPG researchers in particular. First is that to sample, you want to randomly sample to avoid possible bias, and to randomly sample, you need a sample frame. Now a sample frame can be sometimes easy. I know of one researcher, who, when researching a region in the North East of England took out a dice, rolled 4, and went through every 4th person in that areas phone book having his PhD assistant researchers ring every single one. His response rate was 3%, which just gives you a clue as to how successful this was, but importantly he had a random sample from a defined sample frame. MMO researchers aren’t that lucky. The only sample frame of online game players would be the subscriber or membership details contained in an MMO games company’s database. However, with one recent and important exception of Williams et al. (2008) relationship with Sony Online Entertainment, researchers into online games have normally faced a very large brick wall of dis-interest (or indeed downright hostility) from computer games companies when they ask (or politely beg) to access their subscribers to form a sample frame.

Company’s understandable reluctance

The first question is why is this case? Well, unfortunately the question is rather obvious. Beyond the most obvious and immediate privacy issues, subscriber details will give a researcher access to the number of subscribers the games company has, a hugely commercially sensitive piece of information for an MMO games company. MMO game company’s tightly control this information as it can have a great effect as to whether their game is considered to be growing, stable or “dying” a state which no games company wants ever to be associated with their product which is dependent on the confidence by players that other people keep playing this game too. Witness the amazingly rapid press release by the Administrators of RealTime Worlds who when unbased rumours started to circulate after the company went into administration fairly sprinted to get out a press release with positive details to quash those rumours. Perception of dying, in an rather unfunny way, is the touch of death to an MMO. So, there is actually a very important commercial reason beyond the normal types of issues; we can’t see the point in co-operating, we don’t want to have to spend time dealing with you, we really don’t care about research, we’re concerned about spam research e-mails annoying our subscribers.

Hard to Access

In many ways, because of this lack of access, indeed, a purposeful (and unfortunately, highly logical) denial of access effectively means the MMO gamer population is a “hard to access” population (Goode, 2000). “Hard to Access” actually has a specific meaning in research, it goes beyond the concept of it simply being difficult to survey or access this population, in includes the concept that Goode (2000) details of their being an active barrier or deterrent in the way of the researcher, in this case, the company is actively dis-incentivised to allow access to researchers.

So what do MMO researchers do when faced by this “hard to access” population? Well those of us not blessed with great contacts have to follow the path that Nick Yee has been treading for many years now in sampling the customers without interfacing with the company. This has its benefits (i.e. you can ask any question you as a research want and aren’t limited by what the company will let you ask) but it also has quite sizeable downsides, in particular we return to that chestnut I started this post with; is it representative? Now Nick Yee, and my own research, has tried to access the “hard to reach” MMO game customers by advertising through various online internet venues (Internet gaming Blogs, well travelled websites like MMO-Champion etc). Nick also built up his own e-mail list of previous respondents to his various surveys and e-mailed them out details of new surveys he had up.

Snowball Sampling and Pass Along Effect

At first this may resemble a Convenience Sample (though building up the contacts to be able to use these venues is generally far from convenient!) However, generally the MMO researcher asks for respondents to highlight their survey to possibly interested people that they know, which means the researcher is generally trying to access the respondents social network of fellow gamers to increase the response rate; this creates a Snowball Sample. The effects of this actually cover most general internet based surveys, though it’s incredibly under-discussed in the empirical literature. The reason why it’s under-discussed is simple, at the possible advantage of getting your survey more coverage (a research survey of mine was re-posted at 38 locations beyond the initial venues) you lose control of the places your research is being advertised. This “pass along effect” (Norman and Russell, 2006) affects the vast majority of online survey research.

Coverage Bias

The entire point of all of this effort is to gain as many respondents as possible, to collect as much data as possible, to be able to gain as representative a sample as possible. Whatever the size of this data collected isn’t a random sample though, and introduces clearly a type of bias which can effect representation; coverage bias (which even some research using sample frames have it should be noted). Coverage bias is when you, by your sample frame (or in this case lack of it) are perhaps missing a proportion of the population. Early Psychology studies are infamous for this, indeed much of the “random sampling” in the early 1950’s and 1960’s psychological statistical work was done taking a “random sample” of the sample frame of university undergraduate students (who, just happened to be convenient to access for the researchers). These results were then generalised to the entire population. Yes indeed, as the entire population was well educated, mainly male (in the 1950’s and 60’s remember), middle class or higher, and in the 18-24 age range… obviously. Even very well respected studies such as Morgan and Hunt’s Commitment Trust Theory (1994) which has over 6400 citations and climbing, use as their sample frame independent tyre retailers who belonged to the National Tire Dealers and Retreaders Association (NTDRA), Question, what if a tyre retailer isn’t a member? They’re called “independent” for a reason! Not everyone belongs to this organisation, what if they belong to the rival organisation? Indeed, even Wiilaims et al. (2008) who got unprecedented access (I’m professionally jealous, I’ll freely admit it) to Sony Online Entertainment Everquest 2 subscriber databases have the issue in that their coverage is only of…. Everquest 2 players! Their may have no problem generalising from their data to the rest of the Everquest 2 population (and, with a 7000 sample size, not many people would argue!) however they’d start to be on less solid ground if they attempted to generalise their results to the general MMORPG population.

If that’s the issues you get when you have a sample frame, without a sample frame it’s even worse. Who are you sampling, who have you missed? Researchers without a sampling frame have to accept that their research has an innate limitation in the method. This doesn’t mean the results are flawed, but it does mean that researchers should take extra steps to ensure they have attempted as best they can to mitigate the effect of this limitation upon the representativeness of their findings. Mitigate being the important word here, as it’s something which cannot be overcome nor should it be hidden (as any researcher worth the name will literally rip your research apart if they spot you haven’t acknowledged this limitation).

Mitigation through Demographic Benchmarking

The main way to mitigate (but not overcome, it’s something you can only overcome by altering the sample method itself) the damage to a claim to representativeness is to show that the objective demographics of the sample collected by the data collection method employed is similar (or at least consistent) with the objective demographics (age, gender etc) of other large scale studies. Yee’s various studies from 2003 to 2007, and Seay et al (2004) and Williams et al. (2008) are all good large scale studies with 1500+ sample sizes. By benchmarking the sample data objective demographics against other large scale studies you can evidence that while your sample may not be random it does display similarities with the objective demographics of similar studies and as such does not display obvious coverage bias.

Generalisability and Value

Given this is a problem which cannot be overcome, merely mitigated, the question of how much value we can put in MMO customer based research may be the next question. The points to consider here are: Firstly, as academics or researchers we are suppose to be critical of the methods we employ. Second, while research conducted using non-random methods has limitations, it is neither either valueless nor necessarily flawed.

When faced by an insurmountable obstacle such as the inability to access a sample frame for a truly random sample the question should be asked: should we merely give up because of this? Of course not. It is a limitation to the research method, and we should acknowledge that of course we actually desire a truly random sample of data to analyse. However we should also acknowledge that without using what is a limited method we would otherwise be unable to start to answer with empirical data in any way empirical orientated research questions.

Though I have actually met a couple of highly positivist statisticians who are going to howl at this comment, researchers sometimes have to work with what is possible and practical, not what is theoretically desirable. At some point, if we want empirical data to be collected to analyse this research area, an acceptance and acknowledgement of a limitation must be made. It can be mitigated though benchmarking, but it can never be solved. Does that make the value of this research nil? No. It should make the claims that any MMO researcher (or indeed, any internet researcher in general using a similar data collection method) regarding generalisability something that has to be carefully considered. Any claims should be made with significant caveats.

Why Study Virtual Worlds?

2010-08-24T03:42:00.000-07:00

I don't. Thats the first point, I'm researching a real world businesses whose business model is to sell entertainment products. That entertainment product in question is a computer based virtual world. I don't research games, I'm looking at a successful business and business model.

I was inspired to examine MMO gaming literature when came across a request for participation in an academic survey on MMO’s in 2004 by Dr Nick Yee, a sociological researcher at New York State University. This led to me examining further the academic work on MMO’s by Ed Castronova who examined an MMORPG from a purely economic perspective. What interested me from this initial pass of the literature was, as a business academic, the lack of business orientated research regarding these businesses which were at the time generating sizeable and increasing volumes in subscription revenues. This moved me to examine further the computer game industry journals and publications, and it became obvious from this reading that, apart from technological computing advances, the computer gaming industry had very little regard for academia in general as it failed to treat them as serious business people and they failed to see the business applicability of the research.

From the perspective of someone on the inside, the average piece of academic
games research just doesn’t get the job done. It’s not a question of quality of
the research or the intelligence of the researcher or the game maker; it’s a
question on bridging the gap between the academic and business cultures. (Hopson,
2006, p.1)

As a business lecturer therefore I was interested at the lack of business research on what I perceived to be a profitable business model with professionals who, frankly, saw academia in general as providing useless research. I perceived both a gap in the literature where a lack of solid instrumentally focused business research seemed to be, and this was also a corresponding gap between what academics where providing and what business professionals wanted. Indeed, I firmly believe that future research into this industry needs to be conducted and two hurdles overcome. Firstly, researchers must address the expressed desire from games designers for research which is useful and instrumental. Hopson (2006) makes clear; “the games industry isn’t listening” (p.1), researchers must reflect on the idea that maybe this is because they just aren’t publishing anything which is actually of use to the games industry, or worth listening to. Secondly, there must be greater involvement and engagement from the games industry with researchers. My study found insurmountable hurdles in gaining access to information, and while competitive advantage and confidentiality issues need to be addressed to reassure game developers,the potential usefulness of business research to the games industry shouldn’t be stifled by them.

Having identified a gap in the literature, which was the lack of academic examination of the MMO gaming companies and their products as businesses, the research questions started to take form. These research questions emerged from both the gap in the literature and subsequent examination of the professional and industry literature regarding computer games as a business. In particular the numerous industry papers of the International Game Developer Association (2002) and (2004) in particular gave excellent insights into the importance of customer retention to the online gaming business model. This is also discussed in the industry paper by Dooselaer and Coopers (2003) who neatly captures the importance of long term customer relationships to the business models used by online games. From examining the industry literature it thus became clear that the MMO gaming business revolved around the importance of customer re-subscription. From this a instrumentally orientated research aim and the three underlying research questions emerged.

What affects and influences the customer decision to re-subscribe to their chosen MMORPG entertainment product?

Firstly, which of the relationship marketing customer service constructs identified from the literature are important in the re-subscription decision made by customers? Secondly, are there relevant factors in the context which affect these customer service constructs? And finally, how do the key constructs interact to influence the re-subscription decision?

Sabbatical

2010-01-03T02:54:00.000-08:00

So, now on Sabbatical finishing the write up of my data. And indeed, I've so far been a very good boy and been into the library to work every single day since the start of the Sab. Not much time for Blog updates lately I'm afraid.

Quite possibly the most interesting thing happening at the moment that caught my eye was Operation Unholy Rage in EVE Online http://ccp.vo.llnwd.net/o2/pdf/QEN_Q3-2009.pdf (page 24 onwards)

Some very interesting stuff discussed there.

Oh well. Back to work.

Gen X and the PUG-ers

2009-10-29T08:13:00.000-07:00

MMO's are considered socially interactive games. However after reading and watching a very good video by Clint Hocking on generational differences that I followed off Tobolds Blog onto Teuts, I'm not so sure. It's an excellent video and well worth an hour of you time to watch I should add, and certainly has coloured a few opinions I had and opened a few avenues of thought. Well worth a look.

As a Gen X-er myself certainly I found myself considering many of the people I know of the various generational life cycle stages discussed in the video, and while I had issues with a few things in the video , certainly a few concepts clicked well.

So, back to my starting comment: MMO's are considered socially interactive games.... but are they?

Essentially, if you look at the market leading MMO, WoW, it is really 2 different games. The leveling game from 1-79, and the endgame at 80. Whats more, these games are pretty much chalk and cheese. One is a solo-ist grind which *was* when the game launched in 2004 quite a brutal grindfest of around 240 hours to max level your character (which appeals to a Gen-X-er audience of people who like punishing hardcore games), the other requires some need for interaction. Originally that Interaction was again, pretty punishing/abusive in it's commitment needs. Molten Core in classic initially (not by the time we had AQ & ZG out I should quickly add, my guild had it down to around 3 hours by then) could be 6-8 hours straight of work for no reward other than some metagame currency DKP.

Weirdly, it worked, WoW flourished, though admittedly, the game has had a steep reduction in the abusiveness/punishing scale since then from patch after patch.

The ultimate in the punishing/abusive gameplay being the classic PvP system. I knew someone who achieved Rank 14, they ended up playing 7 hours (or more) a day for weeks on end, and in the last few weeks before they (just) achieved it, they we taking sick time off work, Holidays and they nearly lost their job. That little relic of the past from WoW fortunately is now consigned to history, but just goes to show, despite this, people, Gen X-ers, did it, and the game flourished. (though the designers later admitted the size of the error in combining a grind system with a competitive system, creating a competitive grind....)

The problem here is, if you follow the (hugely generalised and very debatable in their applications admittedly) concepts of Baby Boomers, Gen X-ers and Gen Y-ers that Clink Hocking discusses, quite a huge portion of the WoW player base are probably Gen X-ers who like to solo (being loners), and, when they do like to group, they like to be able to do it on their terms.

Now, obviously the best part of "doing it on your terms" is to do it with people you trust at a time which suits you. So Gen X-ers probably like Guilds, in which they can carefully make their own determinations over who they trust to group with and who they don't (we like to make our own opinions).

Doing it "on your own terms" also means being able to pick your own abuse level. Some people still like the punishing/hardcore element of WoW, and self create this by signing onto hardcore raiding guilds were that need is fulfilled. Others, probably the less masochistic of us, pick guilds which more suit our needs.

One of the conundrums with WoW though, certainly for me, has always been the Pick Up Group. The PUG. The PUG certainly fulfils the need of "doing it when I want" for someone like myself, and not having to wait on anyone or anything. But the huge downside is that it breaks those bonds of trust sharply for us Gen X-ers that we like so much. We trust our guildmates (after experiencing the game with them) people in PUG's....?

Well, with the latest upcoming patch, 3.3., of WoW again try's to address this issue once again... and kindly they've increased the ignore list to compensate for the very expected issues that are going to arise.

Will everyone suddenly start using the system? I await to see. The incentive structures are certainly interesting.... but honestly, will we like meeting new people and interacting more in this "social game"? Will Gen X play nice?

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Nobel Peace Prize

2009-10-13T00:19:00.000-07:00

Personal

Got to say; it's a choice as vapid and vacuous as Obama getting it, so why not?

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Attributes of Failure

2009-10-10T04:27:00.000-07:00

The poor launch.

WAR Online's launch in North America, by all accounts, went OK. In Europe? Well..... EA Mythic decided to appoint GOA as their provider, despite strong customer opposition and a track record of this company being disappointing in it's service delivery for DAoC...

Needless to say, for the people who paid extra money for the "pre-launch" access, and who couldn't recieve it and those who just couldn't play at all for a few weeks in Europe... Less than impressive.

The polish stopping early.

Tortage. Never have I seen a better entry into a game. Tortage is great. From level 1 to 20 in Conan is probably some of the best MMO content I've seen prior to WotLK.

The point being, as soon as you level Tortage at level 21, that polish stops. The rest of the game (at the time I played it at launch) being some of the WORST MMO content I've ever experienced.

Repetitive, dull, mechanical, pointless.

City of Heroes has a great Character creation system. Ace. And indeed, this is the best part of the game. The worst part of the game? The entire rest of it.

Empty meaningless grind quests that have no point, story or indeed, interest. Some of the early WoW content is awful, but at least it changes. Going into warehouse configuration 3 for the 5th time and beating on repetitive blanks of opponents in a meaningless fashion kills the game fun and enjoyment.

The best PvE content being undo-able when you get to it.

Public quests! Great idea. Fantastic in fact. At launch..... getting 20 people together post launch to do some of those interesting 3 stage public quests? Fail.

A pity, as the content itself was great, you just never got to do it.

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Useless and Pointless Problem Solving

2009-09-29T02:45:00.000-07:00

Personal

Timeliness is a concept it seems my mind has trouble with.

Years ago (and not even in a galaxy far, far way) I used to play a card game, a CCG called Raw Deal.

In a particular era of that game (Summerslam, if memory serves, back in 2002, though possibly I'm getting my dates wrong here, it was the set Trish came out in) I played a rather horrible and nasty deck based on the RTC superstar. I played a very dull variant of this consistent game winning machine called RTC Control. It had a very simple winning strategy, it played "3 clutches of doom" and working off that 3F, it went to victory.

During a very long spell of me winning with it, including a trip to Edinburgh in which I won a "hardcore belt" for 22 straight matches, I was very happy indeed (especially after my rather rubbish start to playing the game in which I couldn't win a game with my Jericho deck at all for quite some time). I then lost to a friend of mines deck, Graham, who played a superstar called Trish Stratus that had just come out in the Summerslam set.

The problem is, I could not see a method of actually beating him. His method of play was an autowin for him against one deck. He played one card (JR Style Slobbernocker) at 0F (because of Trish's) ability and then drew me out. And there was nothing I could do to stop him from winning using that method. Nothing.

I remember the setting in which he proved this clearly, as it was a tournament in Newcastle (at the Stout Fiddler pub). Some people had come up from Sheffield, including future UK champion Rob Maslen (who as playing Eddie, a rather broken superstar at that point) and I pretty much demolished the field with my deck. I had a future UK champion looking depressed and throwing rather pointless cards..

In other words, life was good.

Then I played Graham (who had been conferring heavily with another field of mine Ben). First turn, he plays JR Style Slobbernocker and declares he wins.

I spend the next 15 minutes thinking this through before conceding, yes, he wins.

1 matchup I cannot cope with.

My mind does cart-wheels for weeks. At the time I'm working a rather pointless job at the NHS, and my mind wanders and I spend hours upon hours while I read cardlists over and over again, looking for winning combinations, or a counter.

Last night, my mind (the cards are long gone for years) was just wandering as I was reading the paper on the way home and neatly dropped the answer in my lap. Put J.R. Style Clubberin' in the pre-match and you turn an autoloss into a win if he doesn't also pack a J.R. Style Clubberin', or at the very least a 50/50 draw if he starts playing J.R. Style Clubberin'.

And now the important bit.

WHAT A POINTLESS THOUGHT TO HAVE!

Given that the game is now dead, and the Summerslam era was only from 2002 till 2003 and the a multitude of future sets made decks change completely. It's a bit like finding the "secret" tactic of how to win the First World War in 2009. Pointless.

I spent about 3 minutes on the train trip berating myself on the train for not spotting the answer at the time, then another 5 minutes berating myself for wasting time berating myself over something so pointless.

Why that came into my mind though, why it actually filtered though, I find fascinating though. I haven't even thought of Raw Deal in YEARS. Really, years. Yet my mind still remembered the card text on a card, a specific (pointless) situation that will never re-occur, and had found an answer.

But..... how pointless was all that analysis? I sincerely hope my subconscious moves onto more important things!

Oh well, at least how this little cathartic post finally lays the matter to rest in my head....

Or maybe, just maybe, tonight my subconscious will give me the answer to that little puzzle game which so annoyed me when I was 8 in the train home today.... more pointlessness!

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Achievements: Artefacts of Social Capital

2009-09-21T04:27:00.000-07:00

Can you drive? Well before I get into the car, and trust you to drive, I want to see your license to drive.

Can you swim? Well, I'm not letting you onto the boat until I see your Bronze swimming certificate! I can't trust you without that piece of paper!

Are you educated? Well, before I trust you to say anything sensible, can you show me your GCSE's or degree certificate?

Are you married? I don't trust your word that you are without seeing the ring!

We have artefacts of our achievements in our life. Some are just pieces of paper which are pretty meaningless, some mean a lot. These artefacts (in the literal sense of the word; created by man or modified by man) define some of us, and in our social culture define our lives.

As with the real world, as with the virtual.

You want to go to Naxx?

Well first link me the achievements The Fall of Naxxramas (25 player) and Epic, or you're not getting in.

With these, you can do Naxx and I can trust you to be part of a raid thats not going to completely mess up, without, you're obvious some social outcast who I don't want to associate with.

Is this a good thing, or a bad thing, I can't decide.

Certainly it has allowed the social capital of players to be more easily identifiable by other players, something high achieving players are certain to want, and it creates a new method of trust to be enabled (perhaps misleadingly so, but thats the subject of another post entirely) which previously didn't exist without extensive communication between players over time.

For many years WoW went on without these mechanisms of creating trust. Then we had the armoury, which allowed guild leaders and raid leaders to check specs and items their raid where using. Meters of varoius types have been used for years to measure players performance and to tell who is a "bad player" from who is a "good player" (again, with sometimes very misleading results!). And, of course, we've always had that age old chestnut of actually talking (or in the case of early wow, /w-ing) a person and chatting with them to make sure they aren't a complete (insert word of your choice here).

And now we have achievements. A useful addition to WoW? E-peen made into something you can have as a permenent addition to your character? or a useful social tool? Or indeed, perhaps both!

Certainly I'm concerned at the useage of these achievements to exclude certain players (as should game designers be!), but then again, as someone who's been able to show his e-peen bling to get into a raid, and more importantly, found that raid to be full of experienced and "good" players I can also see the upside too.

there are issues though, for example I have an up and coming Druid alt, who is e-peen bling-less... will I be able to get him into a raid? Will he be left out in the cold?

What of all those new players? What will their thoughts be when they have doors slammed in their faces because they haven't got the achievements?

Edit:

A friend has shown me the Underachiever addon. Fake bling! I laughed.

Holiday over......

2009-09-11T06:58:00.001-07:00

......... and right back into it.

So, a long summer, with lots of various announcements from companies including Blizzards Cataclysm, which shockingly (to me) made a friend of mine who quit a while back re-join immediately to "try out" the WoTLK material before the new Cataclysm material came out.

I secretly think some people just will use any excuse.

On top of the online gaming and research I also started to explore another, very geeky, and definitely a "tribe" type of product over the summer in the form of Games Workshops Warhammer 40K. Yes, I've returned to my geeky roots and I'm a big boy playing with little models.

Again, what fascinates me is the gathered tribe around the hobby. Park at al (2007) wrote at length about the "consumptive tribe" surrounding warhammer games, and it's been very interesting to see it first hand, with it also giving me ideas as to the future directions, post PhD of my research into customer relationship management and retention. Though I'm sure I'll post in more detail at some other time about the various "hooks" that Games Workshop in particular has already tried through it's marketing to stick into my wallet.

What else? Well, the research analysis has been ongoing and for the most part, the number crunching side has come up with some interesting relationships which, on initial analysis for the most part, have some very interesting implications. (With in particular all the hand-wringing over the RMT market being something game designers might not want to worry about all that too much for instance....) But the heavy part of the write up still has to be done.

Oh well...

In positive news though, my bestest bosses at the bestest university in the whole wide world have given me a semester sabbatical before my PhD hand-in for write up. So that makes for a very happy Dave.

Indeed. to draw on my extensive WoW vocabulary... it's epic.

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Gone Fishin'

2009-07-10T02:55:00.000-07:00

'Tis indeed the start of the great british summer for academics across the country, and I'm no different. Probably won't be updating this Blog until my return to work in September, so cya all till then.

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Biz News: EA combines Bioware and Mythic, Lightsabres win.

2009-06-25T02:02:00.001-07:00

As a business, especially in the tough economic climate we're now in, it was almost an inevitability that after EA's splurge acquisition spree (a tactic, historically, which is almost guaranteed to destroy vast amounts of shareholders wealth in a wide range of business fields) they are now in a consolidation phase.

It's comparable to waking up after a really, really good party where you felt great, were wildly drunk and finding not only do you have a huge hangover, but some of the white elephants you bought while drunk don't look so great in your house now.

What an interesting comment on their website too:

Today we have important news to share with the community. EA
is restructuring its RPG and MMO games development into a new group that
includes both Mythic and BioWare. This newly formed team will be led by Ray
Muzyka, co-founder and General Manager of BioWare. With this change, Ray becomes
Group General Manager of the new RPG/MMO studio group. BioWare’s other
co-founder, Greg Zeschuk will become Group Creative Officer for the new RPG/MMO
studio group. Rob Denton will step up as General Manager of Mythic and report to
Ray. BioWare’s studios remain unchanged and continue to report to Ray.Mark
Jacobs, co-founder and current General Manager of Mythic, will leave EA on June
23, 2009. We thank Mark for his contributions at Mythic and wish him the very
best going forward. Mark played a major part in the success of Mythic with his
contribution as General Manager and Lead Designer of WAR.Mythic retains a strong
team led by Rob who co-founded Mythic in 1995. Rob played a critical role in the
development of Dark Age of Camelot. In his previous role as COO, he was
responsible for all day-to-day management of the studio including all
development, operations and support. Please join us in celebrating the union of
these two award-winning studios.

It could be shorted to; EA made a huge and expensive bet that WAR would be a wow-killer success and paid huge amounts for the company. That bet failed. Now, with Bioware in the ascendancy, ALL OF THE TOP POSITIONS of Mythic are either being culled or the people now report to Bioware.

In other words, though hilariously we should be "celebrating the union" this looks, from a business point of view like a bit of a bloodbath for EA in restructuring, particularly on the Mythic leadership side of the deal. Bluntly, this doesn't look like a "union", it looks like a palace coup followed by executions.

There's a piece, and some very interesting follow on comments, regarding this on the Broken Toy's site here and here at Gamasutra.

What I do find interesting is the accumulation of tid-bits regarding EA from both their financial statments and general analyst reports etc. After their buying frenzy, clearly they are looking to make some of those business units pay off, and placing a lot of pressure on particular "stars" to perform.

For the sake of those people working at Bioware, I hope they do well with SW:TOR then... At the very least they have the incentive of looking at what happens to their EA colleagues at Mythic if they want to see the results of seeing what happens when EA doesn't get the returns it expects.

I'd predict further cullings in the near future too.

The outlook for the business of gaming over at EA looks rather... PvP-esque....

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Marketing Stupidity: Tooled up at the checkout!

2009-06-21T01:32:00.000-07:00

OK, It's a bit of fun, and I'm not exactly worked up about this, as I can appreciate the laugh, and hey, if this is Wal-Mart, the semi-automatics are in aisle 17.. This is very American. It's an American only product after all.

We in the UK, on the other hand, are currently having a government sponsored crackdown on knife crime though, and I just have to laugh at the concept of a TV advert showing someone pulling a 3 foot blade on someone else in a supermarket. Yes I appreciate it, and yes, I find it funny and enjoyable, but I think the UK Advertising Standards Board might actually have some kind of aneurysm if that advert was shown in the UK..

"Scores on the doors"

2009-06-19T03:57:00.001-07:00

So I've now closed my research survey, with 2,226 participants of which 1,527 fully completed the survey. Since my "dream figure" for reasons of representativeness was around 1,000 completions, to beat that figure by over 50% makes me a delighted researcher.

I now start the interesting process of data clean up then analysis.

I'm actually excited about the prospect of that..... thus clearly there is something wrong with me!

Premature e-Declaration's

2009-06-16T09:40:00.000-07:00

The (possible) decline of WoW has been discussed on a number of places I've seen in my internet travels here and here recently.

However, as I pointed out to Tobold on his blog (and was largely ignored by subsequent posts) Activision Blizzards most recent quarterly filing for the quarter ended 31/3/09 shows a year on year quarterly increase from $275mn in 1st quarter of 2008 to $314mn in 1st quarter of 2009 in their MMORPG revenues.

The computer games market changes fast, right?

Here's an edited version of the top 20 PC game sales in May 2009 in North America.

1. World Of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (Blizzard Entertainment)
3. World Of Warcraft Battle Chest (Blizzard Entertainment)
4. World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment)
11. World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (Blizzard Entertainment)

I'm astonished, I'll be honest, as these are new box sales figures for the month, each one a new North America subscriber. And this for a game which has been out 4 years, and the latest expansion is 8 months old... and still topping the PC game charts.

As a researcher, I like hard data to support conclusions, and I simply can't see, when you put together the latest PC games sales and Blizzard Activision's latest quarterly results, how you can draw a conclusion of "decline".

The product will eventually enter into a decline phase, and I believe that could even be on the immediate horizon (the 2nd slew of upcoming MMO's hopefully having learnt the lessons of the corpses of the 1st slew... Bioware... If they where a racehorse I'd have a solid bet on them right now...) But I can't see it right now.

Indeed though, I'm sure when the declaration that "World of Warcraft is in decline" finally comes true a number of people will point to their posts now (and for some people, their practically constant predictions) and say; I was right.

Hmm. I'm sure, in a similar vein, if I keep saying "the UK recession will end next month", I'll be right... eventually.

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Skills I learnt in WoW

2009-06-16T05:14:00.000-07:00

I've had some IBM research into online gaming and leadership knocking around on my hard-drive for a while now, but a chance e-mail from a research colleague made me interested to see if IBM had subsequently done anything with this further.. and LO.. another very interesting report.

It got me thinking, what transferable skills have I learnt in my near 5 years as a WoW player?

Interestingly, given my position at the University and my job, I'm intentionally never sought a position of responsibility in a guild. I've never wanted the problems which go along with it. One of my good friends is a raid leader for a pretty hardcore guild though and certainly he's got his one-to-one skills cut out trying to keep on top of that job.. and I do mean job, as being in charge of a serious guild is a lot of work, and I have no idea why people would seek that stress in whats supposed to be their relaxation.

Hmm, so what have I learnt from WoW?

The best I can come up with is, at the very least, my typing speed is practically demonic now.

Oh well, for 4 year of investment, at least I've something :-)

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An Environment for Consumptive Tribes?

2009-06-15T12:53:00.000-07:00

My weekend certainly got me thinking this week about the nature of consumptive tribes and the possibility of intrinsic, culturally specific elements, which create the... for the want of a better word... environment... (that's such a wrong word, but it'll do for now)... which a consumptive tribe needs to go beyond mere customers to a collective of interested, perhaps (at extremes) rabidly devoted (you should see the research paper on Cliff Richard fans I've read.. no joke!).

Certainly an element of critical mass is needed, but there perhaps needs to be more.. An environment (ARG, that word again!) which allows the consumptive tribe to even exist, a social setting, a social framework which is permissive (or indeed supportive) of such things.

And why was I thinking such things? Well, in the middle of a friends Stag-do we detour-ed into something classically British. A Real Ale festival. Yes, I spent a lot of time on Saturday in a huge pavilion tent at a rugby club (Those of you who are British reading this, consider what culturally related things mean that you where expecting me to say.. "..at a rugby club" there...) out in Corbridge drinking flavourful, if somewhat not-as -cold-as-I'd-like-it (Read: warm), beer. Yes, a British man drinking warm beer in a field; I'd become my American friends stereotype.

But looking around that beer tent, it did strike me how much of a real ale drinkers subculture there was. Yes, there was the typical young things necking as much as they could, but all around me that day lots of people who've obviously been to many of these kind of events meeting friends and catching up on conversations.

Maybe my head is far too much into my research at the moment, but a question struck me; why do we have a real ale drinkers consumptive tribe, fans who'll run festivals, plan social events... And not a.... Fosters tribe? Carlsberg tribe? (or indeed, is the Bigg Market in Newcastle just some kind of continuously worshipped shrine to these products?) Why does that product have a consumptive social tribe..... and that one.. doesn't?

It is culture? Certainly many cultures I'm sure have sub-cultures based around one "preserving the old ways" or another, surely we in the UK aren't the only ones with social tribes based around an alcoholic drink (Indeed, last time I was in Germany it seemed a national pastime, my trip to Erfurt included a HUGE beer festival, cold lagers that time though..).

I find it fascinating though at the products which don't get some kind of following, yet are widespread. Harley Davidsons owners have it (indeed, living where I do, I can say from experience, all types of bikes "have it" ) yet soap powder clearly doesn't (Unless I've missed some kind of really specialist site on the Internet.) Little figurines for Warhammer gaming, Real Ale, MMORPG's all these social games, events or products with there consumptive tribes... Why not other ones?

Or, more importantly, maybe the real question should be, how does a marketeer turn a product currently without some kind of a consumptive social tribe, into a product with one? Is there some basic elements which are needed? (A social nature, a setting, a consumption basis would be three off the top of my head).

In an MMO in many ways it's easier, the designers get to play with the very dynamics of their world to create a consumptive drive, they can create a need to work together (Richard Bartle's book Designing Virtual Worlds is actually an excellent read on this very point) but outside of that environment it would seem to get more difficult. A question has to be the, can many of the concepts or lessons of successful tribe builders be transferred to situations beyond virtual worlds.. Or is the environment (Gah! that word again!) so different that we can't transfer much at all to other businesses?

And.......... as you can imagine, after thinking all that for a while, standing around at a beer festival... I went and got another beer to take away the racing thoughts ;-)

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From Subscription to F2P: D&D Online in for Changes

2009-06-12T06:01:00.000-07:00

This story's been out for a while now, and commentated on by a number of sites I frequent here and here most notably. But I've been a little busy worrying over my survey so I've lacked the time to really comment on it.

Now D&D Online was always a shock for me. .. I didn't buy it (Shock-horror!)

Along with all my other completely geeky habits I've, since I was 9 and played Red Box, been an RP-er. Indeed, I still play 4th Ed with a regular group of friends on a fortnightly basis.

And I'm really into MMO's....

Shouldn't I be the perfect customer for D&D Online?

No. As it happens, it never really appealed to me. My problem being that WoW always seemed to do online "D&D" very well, and more importantly, the news from both the beta and the reviews didn't so much entice me, and fill me with a cold dread at the prospect of playing that game.

And I do mean Bad with a capitial B reviews. This is a game which got mauled by certain critical reviewers while still in beta and then after release. Now, that isn't usually a huge issue for me. After all, I also tried Age of Conan, which got hammered by the critics from beta and had some kind of "miracle patch" before release. Bad reviews didn't stop me there.

So why not D&D Online?

A swathe of issues I suppose.

1. It's not Bioware. Thats an issue. I trust Bioware to deliver a good D&D game (Baldurs Gate and it's subsequant sequals... oh, how many hours I've lost to thee...) and I didn't trust Turbine to do the same. Had Bioware made the game, I would have ignored every single bad review printed, including sub 50% reviews, and still bought it.

2. It'd directly got WoW to compete with. In much the same way as any sandbox space-ship based game is going to have to compete with EVE in my head now. D&D Online directly is in a fantasy genre face-off with WoW. And lets face it, as a customer of one fantasy based MMO and comparing it to a near identical product offering nothing new.... It wasn't that appealing.

WAR sold itself on the PVP, the Warhammer IP (another geeky childhood thing).... It had niche. Conan sold itself on graphics, the IP the "more mature" bloodthirsty nature... D&D Online what did it sell itself on? I couldn't really tell at the time to be honest. Certainly their marketing department failed to get the USP across to me (and believe me, I looked). A ruleset (D&D 3rd ed) isn't a USP for an MMO. The D&D IP as a ruleset carries nothing.

What would made me (and perhaps many others) buy D&D Online? Forgotten Realms Online. Perhaps the best known D&D campaign lands. Forgotten Realms has story, substance... an unknown (to me at least) "Stormreach" just didn't cut it.

So... to cut a long story short, I didn't buy it. Indeed. Not many people did. The fabled WoW-killer (Does EVERY fantasy MMO get stuck with that title?) never materialised and D&D Online never really showed up on the radar again for me.

Until now, and the announcement of the change to F2P business model (or, micro-transactions, as it should more accurately be called) .

Firstly, kudo's to the marketing team at Turbine (maybe they sacked the last lot...?) they got the splash they probably wanted. Second, for a game which has effectively "failed" (and the amount of failure an MMO needs to make before it *really* fails on a cash basis is up for debate, I'm sure original EQ still makes money) this looks like a no-lose situation. They'll have a more polished product now, people like myself will come and try it, and hey, thats half the marketing job done.

And for myself, a no-loss situation, if I hate it, it didn't cost a penny, if I like it I'm sure micro-transactions a go-go.

Of course.... For myself, that question still hasn't been answered, what does D&D Online have/do which WoW doesn't? However now, I have a better answer..

"Why don't I go and have a free look?"

I'm sure I'll post some kind of review on the F2P D&D online experience sometime in the future here.

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Research Survey breaks 1000

2009-06-12T05:37:00.000-07:00

As of this morning my completions on my research survey broken the 1,000 barrier, so first of all I'd like to say thank you to any and all who have participated.

It's been an interesting two weeks. I've tried to engage with the community sites as much as possible., and reach out to as many MMO community leaders as I can via e-mails and so forth. Some of which has been more effective than others.

Certainly a few individuals such as Totalbiscuit at WCRadio, Tobold on his Blog and the Forum Community Manager over at CCP on the Official EVE forums have been exceptionally supportive. CCP have even stickied my Survey on their General Forum with an endorsement, which was very kind of them. On the whole the response from EVE players so far has been great.

Many of the various forums I've visited over the last few weeks, notably the MMO-Champion Forums and the Official WoW Europe Forums have actually been very useful, and, for the most part, surprisingly generous with their time in filling out the survey.

Of the social networks I've been trying to engage with, probably the most surprisingly positive response has been from the Linkedin WoW Players, who have been very generous with their time, with surprisingly the posts on the main Facebook sites failing to draw a single response.

Additionally, I've mass e-mailed Northumbria University Students and so far had some very interesting responses, not least from the two lecturers who've so far contacted me regarding the fact they also play WoW!

Who says MMO-gaming isn't the new golf?

Oh well, the survey will be open for another week or so, and I'm travelling to the Academy of Marketing Doctoral Conference next month and presenting on my research, which should be a good opportunity to get some feedback.

Now just to figure out how SPSS works and how to use AMOS for Structual Equation Modelling....

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The world of computer game micro-expansions

2009-06-09T07:14:00.000-07:00

Well, a new thing for me. A mini-purchase of an expansion. So, how'd it go?

Stardock's, rather awesome and addictive RTS game Sins of a Solar Empire (which I highly recommend) has an expansion Entrenchment. Which adds all kinds of stuff to a game I highly rate.

All for around £6...

So, not much of a question for me to be fair.

A simple download of their nifty Impulse Client which looks suspiciously like Steam re-skinned and a few seconds of entering in my details and I'm a happy customer.

The Client even nicely downloads all the latest patches for me automatically.

So a happy customer of a well designed , highly automated system, and my first happy step into paying for computer games micro-expansions.

Why can't all systems be that easy for me to give the people my money?

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Reading: Halting State

2009-06-08T03:51:00.000-07:00

For my birthday I received a sizeable amount of book tokens and I decided to, in something very, very unlike me, not spend them all on seroius business or economics books (though I very much enjoyed both Liars Poker and Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room) Instead, with the holiday season almost upon us, I thought I'd wander through the less well travelled part of the bookshop to me (the bit marked "sci-fi" and "fantasy" and not "crime and "thriller").

I suppose reading habits greatly, greatly change, but I remember as a kid and teenager, and indeed, young adult, I couldn't get enough of Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms etc. Now, with so much of my time devoted to reading around work (Reading Liars Poker or Rogue Economics isn't just for pleasure reading after all) or just reading business related books (Wolf of Wall Street, another very interesting book), I've had very little time, outside of my annual summer holiday, to engage with fiction.

And so, back to my trip to Borders, I decided to just go around the fiction section, with my book tokens, and I ended up buying about nine fiction books from people I've never read before (which, given my reading pace, should last about two weeks... no joke).

I was going to save them for my holiday, but, with the only thing in the newspapers at the moment being politics, I decided to make my 40 minutes (each way) Metro journey a little more interesting by reading some fiction rather than a dull business book... and so.. I picked up

Halting State by Charles Stross

and started reading...

And oh boy, is this a book to only read when you're 100% awake.

It's a book about MMO's, fantasy, future scotland, business and..... well........ a crime (thats what I've got so far anyway). It's very, very assuming of it's readership though, the writer clearly knows his stuff, but OBOY does he have little regard for those people who aren't as into the material as him. As an academic in the area, I'm *just* following the book and I (supposedly) an a student and scholar in the area. Heaven help anyone who fails to meet those benchmarks!

That said, it's highly engaging and, so far, moves at a very high pace, and certainly it's kept me reading so far. The authors style of writing (first person singular) takes a while to get used to, but, after a while, is actually quite good for getting to "grip" (for a want of a better word) the situation.

A book MMO-Gamers will understand (... well mostly understand.. or somewhat..) with the acronyms flying around. What I am finding interesting is the near future technology which is used in everyday life in this book. Especially given my thoughts as to the way mobile technology will be used in the future and the ways we, as a culture, are starting to integrate our lives more it. I'm continiously amazed than my sixty year old self confessed technophobe mom for example has a wireless laptop, sends e-mail and buys off Amazon. And my sister, my "computers are for nerds" sister sells and buys huge amounts of things on Ebay etc.

Halting State gives an interesting glimpse of how our culture might start to adapt as the communications technology starts to become more intrinstic top the way we lead our lives.

If nothing else, so far, it's been an interesting read for that alone.

Will post a rating once I've finished.

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How long? 5 years, 10 years, ever?

2009-06-02T09:53:00.000-07:00

(My survey is on SurveyMonkey here.)

It's E3 and Microsoft are showing off their blue sky R&D ideas to get some headlines. Or thats my interpretation of the video below. And this news story. I remain highly skeptical that any of this is near the market, whatever story journalists are being fed by a highly adept marketing team at Microsoft.

It's great, don't get be wrong, and I truly look forward to the day that I can be playing a computer game with some of the tools shown in the video, but I'm realistic enough to know that much of this stuff is very much still on the drawing board and very far away from being a purchaseable product.

Does though give you an idea that perhaps an MMO in the future like WoW could be a full body workout!

Update:

And here is the Sony response.

How interesting in this news story that a journalist says "Compared to Project Natal, [the Sony controller] didn't look quite so compelling" as, to be honest, the Sony one looks far, far more realistic as to what we could see very, very soon in the marketplace. Compared to the blue sky Microsoft video this looks like something we might see at least soon.

Sony is showing us a working prototype. Microsoft, a cool looking acted video... Draw your own conclusions.

Again though, the future for gaming looks interesting indeed!

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Research Survey is out!

2009-06-01T04:53:00.000-07:00

So, after weeks of pilots, revisions, cuttings and consultations with gamers & academics my research survey is finally out, and the data collection phase of my PhD is underway.

My survey is on surveymonkey here.

One of the biggest problems of any web based survey is participation, so to gain awareness of my survey I've decided to engage with some of the community leaders in the mmo-gaming world.

I've written to TotalBiscuit, of the Blue Plz! WCradio Show, and he's very kindly agreed to promote the survey on his radio show this Friday. I've played WoW for about near on 5 years now, from WoW Europe release, and since then I've been, on and off, a listener to this very good and well regarded series of shows (including the EPIC and other shows TB has done). Generally things discussed on TB's show get sent around the internet very, very fast, and as a leader in the WoW community this show, and the radio station, are very well placed to (hopefully) get the message of my survey out. Admittedly I'm a huge fan of WCradio, and many of it's shows, so I may be biased here, but I think they do a lot for the community, are well respected, and generally, in the past things mentioned on their shows are distributed through the community well (hey! I can hope!)

To access the wider, non-WoW community, I've also written to Tobold, a blogger who I've followed for years now, and who is a excellent weather-vane for what's hot, and whats not, in the MMO-gaming world. He has, very kindly, posted a link on his site for me. Again, Tobold is a well recognised member of the MMO-blogging community, and most web-blogs seem to have him included in their links (like this one does!)

Finally, though I think this won't actually get many responses, I've posted links to my survey on both the WoW-Europe official forums and RPG.net Video Gaming Forums. Though I wasn't originally intending to post on the official forums at all (because I was slightly concerned about the posting rules) after reading the forum posting rules with a fine tooth comb I couldn't see any reason not to put my survey there. Those forums move so fast though that I'm fairly sure that this particular avenue may be lost in the noise.

I can hope though, again, the WoW forums are something I've used for many years now, and, while the signal to noise ratio can sometimes be rather difficult, there are some excellent posts on there sometimes.

Oh well, it's out there, I'll continue the promotion, and I'll hope that engaging community leaders like TB and Tobold that awareness of my survey will be heightened!

EVE Online: The Sandbox doesn't look inviting

2009-05-27T01:38:00.000-07:00

My initial foray into EVE Online has come to an interesting intersection.

I've completed the starter/career quests, I can see the "epic storyline" in the distance, and I can see the usual (dull) courier/kill 10 rats etc quests from the "agents".... but mostly, all around me, I see the sandbox..

And I don't find it appealing.

Maybe I'm missing that very critical element which I think all MMO games need, that successful element which is outside of the reach of game designers, and beyond the scope of any book on the subject.

My friends aren't playing it.

Simply put, practically any game is better, more entertaining, and more engaging if your RL friends are playing the game also. Hell, I could just spend half the night /w my Newcastle supporting friend about their recent relegation, and that would be enough.

Perhaps this is a key external variable that a game designer can never get right, or overcome, and indeed, perhaps it's an attribute which shows why WoW has been so successful. If my friends play WoW leaving to play another MMO can be a pretty empty experience (especially in a heavily social/sandbox game like EVE)

I haven't given up yet though, I'm going to give my 60 days my best shot, thus on my agenda is to join a Corporation and see what it's like. Maybe it'll be a completely different game (I sincerely hope it is) or maybe it'll prove the adage that sometimes hell is other people (Also called "My experience of 5 man PUG's")

On more about the game, as I've said before, this is a seriously hardcore game. No kidding around, that learning curve, as discussed previously, indeed is a cliff, and it's probably only through my actual intention to experience the "other side" if you will of the MMO gaming spectrum which has kept me at it thus far.

One of the most serious issues I have with the game though is the travel time. Literally the mission system does not feel like a very well considered one as I seem to spend half the time alt+tab-ed away reading the internet while my autopilot takes me the 3-4 stops between systems between each mission. The "excitement" time is actually very low compared to other MMO-games I've played at this stage in the player life cycle, and I've occasionally just set the autopilot, gone off, had a coffee, had a chat with my wife, and come back to just being on the next to last jump... Not a great experience.

Like I mentioned though, lets see if this grows on me, it still has about 45 days left

Mobiles games will be pushed for gameplay... what??

2009-05-26T11:45:00.000-07:00

An interesting article over at Gamesutra got me thinking, not because I agree with the article, just the complete opposite, but because I honestly think Mobile gaming is the Next Big Thing (TM)

How silly of the articles writer though. 128K in his words

"These limitations nearly prevent any kind of gameplay from existing at all"

I lol-ed... Hard..

What about the classic Elite? Which today you could practically run of a digital watch these days with it's amazing game requirements. THAT lacks gameplay? My first games computer was an Amstrad 464, 64K of pure raw gaming power, and I played some simply amazing games on it as a kid, including Way of the Exploding Fist and the Original Football Manager. Lemmings! How I remember thee...

To say that these early games, made on less than half the code size that this person is describing, had no gameplay is simply ludicous. Lemmings was an awesome game, it'd be amazing to be able to play that on my mobile; simply amazing.

Bad graphics yes (by todays PS3 and Xbox360 standards) and lacking a polished look certainly, but these games where not lacking in gameplay, addictiveness or innovation, and to comment that 128K hardly allows for a computer game designer to do anything lacks a knowledge of the history of where many game designers have both come from, and in many cases, started with.

Yes, the technology may not be able to give a mobile gamer the full FX output of my current rig on my desk, but to say that these games lacked gameplay leaves me simply... flabbergasted..

Roll on Elite for my Mobile! I'd buy that for cash!

Up and coming contenders: The future

2009-05-21T02:46:00.000-07:00

Had an interesting conversation with a few friends last night regarding the "next big thing" (TM) in MMO's, mainly centred around what we, as a group of MMO gamers and friends, might all be interested in playing, the following ones cross my mind as I drink my morning coffee.

The big names

The big IP driven games are obviously going to have an immediate draw (something I'll have to reflect on at a later date, as strong IP's haven't always been routes to success at all in MMO's) But certainly the ones off the top of my head are:

DC Online - the IP alone makes it deserve a view, I'll probably skip Champions Online altogether (unless it gets excellent reviews) in favour of this one.

Star Wars: The Old Republic - Interestingly for me, this is an instant yes. I like the Star Wars IP, and I've always been very impressed with the products Bioware have produced, with Baldurs Gate I, II + Throne of Bhaal, still being, for me, the best computer RPG storyline I've ever played. I'm pre-sold.

Star Trek Online - Still a while yet, as Cryptic just picked up the license, but I'm a sucker for all things Star Trek, and so I'll probably buy this one even if the reviews are awful to try it out.

Beyond the big names

The Agency - I was a huge Syndicate fan back in the day, so anything of this kind of genre sounds very interesting to me. It also sounds, for the want of a better word; different, just starkly different from anything currently out there, which is appealing. SOE obviously have experience with MMO's as well.

To be honest, one of the scary things is actually looking down the list of the current MMO games in development (an incomplete list I should add!) and seeing the vast array of games which, to me, just look like either clones of current products, or leave me wondering which audience the designers are intending to try and get.

I'm sure a number of those games I'm not hardly giving enough credit to, and I'm sure a number of them might become the "next big thing" (TM).

I do have to wonder at the line of corpses of MMO games which will be the hallmark of all the others though.

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Link-me-in: Research and Business networking in the modern world.

2009-05-20T02:42:00.000-07:00

It was described to me as the "Facebook for professionals" by a friend who uses it, so I thought I'd give LinkedIn a try.

So I set up my profile and had a bit of a snoop around. The first thing I noticed was the "groups" which is where most of the action seems to take place.

So I added myself to a few MMO business related groups and quickly got involved in a very interesting and enlighting conversation between Chris Hood CEO of BooHag Studios and Mike Sellers, CEO of Online Alchemy regarding the funding of MMO businesses by Venture Capitalists. A very useful conversation as Mike agreed with the thrust of my points regarding VC's, which I found a pleasing confirmation as I was coming from a business scholar and researcher POV and Mike, with vast industry experience, was able to confirm what I was saying was borne out in practice.

So a good, and pleasing start, but I feel that I'm only using a fraction of the potential of this resource. The questions being; which groups to add myself to? What should I be putting on my profile?

So far though, I'm quite positive about it.

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Anticipation: Expectations Management 40K style?

2009-05-19T05:25:00.000-07:00

Warhammer 40,000 the MMO is on the horizon.

Am I excited?

What are my expectations? (Other than a frenzy of geekry?)

The game itself is potentially still three or four years away... and yet the marketing game has started now. Every tidbit of information will be slowly fed into the public domain (will it be read/acknowledged?) and rabidly spread to others by potential advocates like myself.

It must be nice to know as a game designer that you have at least some of the game pre-sold just on the concept/license (indeed the very idea of having a licensed product!). I suppose the worry is for them that, especially for those experienced in Warhammer products, will they be able to meet the expectations?

Already I have my baselines; Dawn of War, Dawn of War II.

Can the designers create as polished a product as those? Well, they have years I suppose. rather than being cynical, maybe I should wish them luck... They'll need it..

...And maybe drop them the hint to not let the marketing people build the expectations up to un-manageable and un-realistic levels.

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The mini-max race of user generated content? City of Heroes Redux

2009-05-18T13:45:00.000-07:00

OK, I must admit this, I saw instantly the area for exploiting the new City of Heroes and Villains expansion. I did quite like the new expansion, and indeed waxed lyrical about it, it did not escape my attention... (cough).. that a mini-maxing character leveling situation could possibly... (looks innocent).. be used....

OK, OK, the thought police win, it not only crossed my mind, it ran onto my keyboard and created a number of story arcs that specifically where for that purpose, specifically using enemies and combos which my character could (as a Mastermind) hammer through without any major difficulties.

Unlike most farming missions though, mine at least had a storyline (..these excuses sound lame even to me..).

The issues of user created content will be interesting from an external perspective though, and obviously the game designers will take some kind of action. The main question will be, with over 5000 new story arcs (and more very day), can they keep up if they simply take an banning approach?

In addition, what happens when you start to get well written, interesting and intricate story arcs, which aren't blatant farming tools (i.e. like the ones I wrote), which are, effectively, farming tools. At the moment the farming missions are easy to spot as the arc writers haven't even really bothered with text, story or plot etc. What happens when the players game the system yet again and produce higher story quality "farming missions"? How do you distinguish these "good arcs" from "bad arcs"?

The obvious solution is to introduce a user created content xp cap (which flexes with time spent doing the mission; see I though of the main crux already) on how much you can gain from a user created arc which the designers feel is similar to the time/xp ratio for missions already in the game... Whether this kind of solution, or an alternate (punitive) solution, is put in place I await with expectation.

I use the word expectation as it related to my previous post; what expectations have been built, how many users have returned to CoH/V because of this very feature (many, according to some boards I've read...) and what kind of expectations blow might that have on these returning customers if the main feature they returned for gets punitively altered.

I can instantly see the dilemma for the game designers and company though.

An MMO is a huge time sink. By allowing people faster ways to achieve the maximum levels, from a pure business point of view, you are possibly losing the two or three months of possible subscription income from that persons playtime, which is never going to be useful for the subscription based MMO business model of NCsoft.

My reflective question of the evening though is, given the life cycle of the game in question, and the way the community and returning players have embraced this new content addition, how does a game designer possibly make that devils choice between the possibilities of

exploiting players losing them income vs
the potential losses of changes to the new system putting off returning (and existing players)

Umm, if I was a game designer at NCSoft, I'd ask for a raise before I made that particular call.

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Expectation Management: Hellgate

2009-05-18T07:26:00.000-07:00

Just as a coda really to my Age of Conan post on my views on the main failing point being expectation management, if found it interesting to read Bill Ropers views in an interview with Gamasutra regarding why he felt Hellgate failed.

The frightening part is just the level of competition coupled with that expectation of players. We definitely saw that with Hellgate at Flagship. The game disappointed a lot of people. It wasn't horrible. It wasn't great, but it was a good game, it was solid, and it really failed out at filling up because the level of expectation based on the amount of...
Because of the competition, the amount of hype you're generating or press you have to do, and all those things to really get it into the consciousness of gamers, then it just keeps raising and raising and raising and raising that expectation.
I think there was also the fact that we were a bunch of ex-Blizzard guys and the guys who made Diablo. And so it's like, "Oh, this is gonna be the best game ever made." It was the best game we could make, but it didn't meet those expectations. And that is a frightening proposition because we spent the time we needed to, we spent the money on it. At the end, we needed more time than we had...

EVE Online: Life in the Sandbox, Learning curves

2009-05-18T00:36:00.000-07:00

A free 14 day trial account on EVE turned into me buying the retail box which had a few special goodies in and, more importantly, 60 days playtime.

And so I return to EVE, the ultimate opposite of the casual friendly WOW, the game which has such a high entry point in terms of MMO learning curve that you can be put off the game in the tutorials... Yes, I got my starter ship genuinely blown up and lost all my stuff in a tutorial mission.

EVE really is that "Hardcore".

Of course, having been in the game only about 30 minutes "losing all my stuff" wasn't exactly a hardship.

The tutorial system isn't exactly intuitive itself and seems to falter from time to time. Some of the tutorials give you "free stuff" for doing them, and thus are important and critical for basic gameplay, however there is no roadmap to which to do. The Game goesn't lead the newbie player by the nose at all in those first few steps, and seems to have little regard for such things as a basic "starter zone".

Admittedly, WOW isn't great on this either, there is no, "press w to go forward" or "to loot, right click" tutorial in WOW, even there the RTFM (A phrase a Star Trek game called "read the fine manual"... ) mentality exists.

Contrast this to another (single player) game I bought this weekend, Star Wars: Empire at War Gold Edition (With the expansion thrown in) and you have there a clear set of tutorials which start from the basic premise of the user not knowing anything at all, which was very nice as while I could RTFM the manual itself consisted of about, literally, a back of a cigarette packet sized instructions on actual gameplay in the manual.

So, back to EVE, I did, finally, get control of my ship, and spent few hours working my way through the basic intro Agent missions (missions which, I should add, if I didn't know they existed through pre-reading the newbie forums on the EVE wesbite I easily could have completely missed!)

For all my whining so far, I should add, EVE is fun, and appeals to the 1980's Elite playing gamer in me very much. I've already (after again reading from the community forums; something I'll have to reflect on in a later post) decided on going on a pirate hunting track.

The question might be raised, why am I doing this. well, I certainly don't want to be accused on a lack of a wide MMO gaming knowledge and certainly while I've read a lot about EVE, playing and reading are two very different things.

My commitment to my research (and I say commitment in terms of both financial and timewise) is to play as many major MMO releases as possible, with both Star Wars: TOR and the (eventual) Star Trek games being ones I'll probably also try in the Sci-Fi genre.

Maybe they'll have a good tutorial system?

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Life on a Ventilator: Age of Conan

2009-05-14T04:31:00.000-07:00

I distinctly remember the pre-marketing blitz on Age of Conan, I was at Gencon US in Indy about a year before release with some friends and right in the middle of the main sales floor Funcom had a quite large draped "tent" which you couldn't see inside. At the tent doorway was a gaggle of beautiful women, which given the audience was a instant seller, and you were only allowed in a few at a time which increased the exclusivity.

The marketing guy rambled on heavily inside to everyone who would listen that this was the first adult MMO game, how Age of Conan was a different audience than WoW, how the graphics where hugely better (they where) and how the gameplay elements of a proper Conan-esqe PvP world would have us all happy.....

I can't speak for a everyone, but as I see the rather interesting resultant MMO product, especially a year on, I have to say... The bullets started to fire at Conan at that Gencon meeting (and before in other marketing prose), and whats worse; the wounds where self inflicted.

One of the key areas I'm coming across in my research at the moment seems to be expectations management, and certainly in selling themselves as being a PvP game was possibly one of their biggest errors as they launched without a PvP system in place.

You'd think that the Unique Selling Point (USP) that all your marketing literature has built upon, and built the expectation of in the customer, would be something you'd get right... Not it seems at Funcom.

And as such, what did we have? Well, give AoC it's due. the first 20 levels (the Tortage, basically single player, starter area) are the most polished I've seen in an MMO, and if every zone had been like that, Blizzard would have been in seroius trouble. But.. it wasn't. I'm strongly reminded of a recent article I read on Gamasutra.... they just seemed to get every bit of game design past those first 20 levels so wrong.

This, and the lack of PvP created a huge expectations gap in the game which Funcom failed to reconcile. Their forums where truely Conan-esqe in their bloodletting as angry mis-led customers who had completely different expectations of the high quality "steak" product (vs the hamburger of WoW, a comment the Lead Designer of Conan Lived to regret) they'd been marketed and sold vented their spleen in spectacular ways. I've played WoW since the beginning, CoH/V , Tabula Rasa etc, lots of MMO's. Never have I seen forums of such dis-heartened customers who thought they'd been lied to and swindled out of their $30.

Building the right expectations, and careful expectations management would seem to be the lesson from Conan then. The Marketing department going full tilt may sell the first box, but MMO's survive by retention and loyalty, not primary box sales.

Solace

2009-05-13T10:56:00.000-07:00

Occasionally, after talking to someone who just doesn't get my research I find the need for solace.

They normally see my research, see "computer games" and don't see beyond this.

They fail to see a $30bn industry. They fail to see an industry we are actually good at in the UK. They fail to see the point in researching something that they find "trivial". With, indeed, the comments (and glances) bordering on plain incredulity that researching this industry can be worth of academic pursuit. They normally don't outwardly mock, but they all but do.

The less than subtle ones look at me like I'm a madman.

Arguements of a $3bn UK turnover alone, tens of millions of paying subscribers (and even more on non-paid games), and one game, World of Warcraft, being the biggest entertainment product ever.... They all fall on deaf ears. Ears that have heard the word "computer games" and failed to see the huge machinery of the industry behind the product.

At times like these, as a researcher into this area, it can be difficult. So, to cheer me up, I like to read the words of Richard Bartle's rather polemic article in April 2008's Guardian.

After reading it, I always feel better as a researcher. Needless to say, I've read it many times over the last year or so. Richard in the article was talking (well... ranting, but it's a *good* rant) about the constant moral outrage against violent computer games, but for me, the context of people not understanding my research works just as well.

Here it is:

We've won: get over it
By Richard Bartle
I'm talking to you, you self-righteous politicians and newspaper columnists, you relics who beat on computer games: you've already lost. Enjoy your carping while you can, because tomorrow you're gone.

According to the UK Statistics Authority, the median age of the UK population is 39. Half the people who live here were born in 1969 or later. The BBC microcomputer was released in 1981, when those 1969ers were 12. It was ubiquitous in schools; it introduced a generation to computers. It introduced a generation to computer games.

Half the UK population has grown up playing computer games. They aren't addicted, they aren't psychopathic killers, and they resent those boneheads – that's you – who imply that they are addicted and are psychopathic killers.

Next year, that 1969 will be 1970; the year after, it'll be 1971.

Dwell on this, you smug, out-of-touch, proud-to-be-innumerate fossils: half the UK population thinks games are fun and cool, and you don't. Those born in 1990 get the vote this year.
Three years from now, that 1969 will be 1972, then 1973. Scared yet? You should be: we have the numbers on our side. Do your worst – you can't touch us. We've already won.

15 years from now, the prime minister of the day will have grown up playing computer games, just as 15 years ago we had the first prime minister to have grown up watching television, and 30 years ago to have grown up listening to the radio. Times change: accept it; embrace it. Don't make yourself look even more 20th Century, even more public school, than you do already.
You've lost! Understand? Your time has passed.

This anxiety you sense, this fear of what you don't comprehend: hey, it's OK. Parents who didn't play computer games do feel alienated, do feel isolated from their children; they do feel frightened, and naturally so, because they can't keep their children safe if they don't understand what they're keeping them safe from.

It's transient, though. Upcoming parents played games themselves, or if they didn't, their siblings did, or their friends did. They're no more concerned about "moral decay" or "aggressive tendencies" or any of the other euphemisms for "ohmygod I don't understand this" than you are about soap operas. They're the present, not you: you're the ever-more-distant past.
Gamers vote. Gamers buy newspapers. They won't vote for you, or buy your newspapers, if you trash their entertainment with your ignorant ravings. Call them social inadequates if you like, but when they have more friends in World of Warcraft than you have in your entire sad little booze-oriented culture of a real life, the most you'll get from them is pity.

In March, the Byron Report came out. How pleased the government must have been with itself! By appointing a parenting expert to lead it, they were practically guaranteeing they'd get 266 pages of ammunition to use against computer games. Just thinking about the popularity boost from cracking down on this evil would have had them salivating with glee!

Except Dr Tanya Byron was born in 1967. When the Sinclair ZX Spectrum came out in 1982, she was only 15. She knew what the government didn't: computer games are here to stay. So long as parents understand the dangers, they can make informed decisions. She didn't recommend lining computer game designers up against the wall and shooting dead every last one of them. Her report was balanced and fair. She suggested education as a solution. That's a level of reason rarely seen in the context of UK government.

So we've won: accept it. Huff and puff if you must, but your audience grows smaller by the day. Your views are mortally wounded, and soon they will be dead.

Games are mainstream. Drown, or learn to swim.

Thank you Richard; I needed that.

Time to get back on that research bike and spinning those wheels again.

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Tower of Babel; The problems of multinational communities

2009-05-12T02:23:00.000-07:00

WoW has a community.

However, is the Chinese "community" the same as the American "community". Probably not, as before we even get to language we must consider culture. Even without a language barrier though is the "British community" similar to the "American community"? Or indeed, can you even tell that these two things are seperate?

Some things transcend the need for language:

Others however, the sharing of strategy, the ability to negotiate or discuss an issue, and importantly, the ability of a company to interact with the "community" perhaps is limited by such barriers. Blizzard for example employs a range of translators, native tongue speaking GM's & community managers and has localised the game in a large number of countries (sometimes using franchises, sometimes not, etc.) but the question stands, how do you, from a marketing point of view, interact with the "community" when the community itself cannot fully inter-communicate because of language barriers.

Perhaps there's a great strategy out there for a number of bosses, but it's written in Chinese, or an awesome radio show, that I'll never listen to, or a Chinese equivalent of "The Guild". I'll never know.

For the business relationship marketing POV though this diversity creates all kinds of potential issues. Classically in a number of games player cries of "The Americans/Europeans/etc are favoured over us" occur, and certainly impression & expectation management issues could result from that.

If community is so important though, this could make the concept of a relationship difficult to construe.

The cost of community?

2009-05-11T04:06:00.000-07:00

A very interesting recent podcast WoW Radio's Totalbiscuits show "Blue Plz" with some interesting numbers given for especially the Curse.com add-on community website regarding expenditures, with five figure sums being discussed for monthly running costs, and on patch days the possiblity of a six figure sum on a patch day in bandwidth costs.

WCradio's monthly downloads of around 750,000 also gives an indication of the costs of being rather expensive for being a "leader" in the community, or, at the very least, a well travelled part of the community.

Both these sites are interesting parts of the community, they both, for want of a better word, have a "product" they provide or a service they provide which the consumptive tribe eats up. A costly one as well. How do they fund these sites? Mainly through targeted online advertising it seems

Interestingly some high value "gatekeepers" of trust like Tobold's Blog, another well travelled site, don't use advertising (where potentially they could, and potentially make quite a bit of money). They though don't have the associated costs.

What I find interesting is that in many marketing papers and books I've read, the concept of the use of an online community is a low cost option for easy access to customers. In practice, (in this abet limited MMO-community at least), keeping a vibrant online community going could actually be quite costly if you are using the online platform to deliver anything beyond a simple information waystation blog or similar.

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Uefa hates us & Developers hate paladins/druids/warriors/take your pick

2009-05-07T00:43:00.001-07:00

As a fan it's difficult to resolve your thoughts on an issue sometimes when you are so close to the issue. Within a community of fans, where a number of fans all feel the same way, I can imagine this becomes a self reinforcing feeling, with you reading comments from people who are expressing feelings which you similarly feel.

UEFA hate us, they didn't want an all English final again; Conspiracy! Conspiracy!

or

The developers nerf-ed Warriors again! They hate warriors!

Meaningless, and emotive, or expressions of identification? Have the fans given the "oppressor" a personality, a motivation, where, in reality, all that exists is a man doing his job without any real malice (though perhaps not with great competence in the views of those who have been "wronged").

How do we view the organisations we "buy-into" when things "go wrong" in our perceptions?

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Information immersement and relationship costs/benefits: Research musings

2009-05-05T09:21:00.001-07:00

I've attempted to immerse myself in information regarding MMO's. My reading list of the left side of this blog is just a fraction of what I read about various games and so forth, but even that gives me pause for thought.

One of the key aspects of both relational benefits and termination costs is perceptions of comparisons. The concept of "is the grass greener on the other side" put into consumptive action if you will.

As a person who has intentionally made himself aware of various new up and coming MMO's, various news and tidbits, and particularly, makes efforts to update this knowledge base regularly, I must come to the question of, how far from the norm am I? Probably very far.

The issue is, for the average WoW player in particular, how aware are they, really, of the competition? WoW can be a particularly consumptively blinding game (I speak from personal experience) particularly when you're in raiding guilds and spending a lot of time playing, and I'm somewhat reminded of a comment regarding someone who stated that if they where in charge of Blizzard for a day what they'd do would be to close down WoW to make the WoW customers actually see the other games out there.

At the time, many people interpreted that comment rather wrongly as anti-WoW. It wasn't, it was more the realisation that the blinkered narrowness (OK, I'm being really emotive and subjective here, I'll admit, and sweeping as well, double badness) of a swathe of WoW players meant that realisation that the competition even existed was an issue.

I remember being at Gen-con a while ago, and, walking around, I bumped into a cheerful seller of an "MMO magazine" which the person tried to interest me in. I asked him how much would be devoted to WoW, and he (again cheerfully) said he could see one regular WoW article a month. My answer? "What do I need the rest of the magazine for then?" (I can be harsh at times....). He went on to explain that the magazine would include all sorts of articles on other MMO's... My answer again.. "Umm, sorry, only interested in WoW".. I could see in his eyes he'd heard the same message a lot that day. (Though, I could have a wide swipe at the "dead tree press" as a favourite blogger of mine calls it here, I'll stop myself... A paper magazine about WoW, or any online game, just has no hope in the face of the Internets vast content)

Getting back the my point at the beginning though; awareness of the competition. How informed are WoW players? Certainly it's a important question to ask, particularly when considering the Travelling Merchants, Committed Followers, Sensualists and Vagrants customer based concepts I have. If the Travelling Merchants are particularly uninformed; does that make them more committed?

The typical WoW player is far from living in a world of economic "perfect information" and "perfect dissemination" partiularly when the WoW community sites are very narrow in their content (for the most part, and again, sweeping generalisations on my part) and usually highly consumptively focused.

Does the customer tribe create a self reinforcing barrier to exit? More questions rather than answers.

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Community Building: Academic Style

2009-05-05T08:32:00.000-07:00

I remember a while back sitting in a rather long meeting which considered the concept of "building a community of academics", it's a horrible conundrum for any academic faculty to have to grapple with. Time, commitment and the realisation of real gains are all issues in this, and it's a problem compounded by the concept of a critical mass.

You don't have a "community" until you reach a critical mass, and that critical mass is what creates the very benefits of a community which people want to be a part of, without which, they can't see the benefits of joining. Catch 22.

Of course "early adopters" etc mitigate a lot of this, but certainly I can see corresponding academic parallels between my investigations into the effect of communities in MMO games in creating lines of communication etc and the concept of an academic community. Which makes the e-mail I got today inviting me to join a new research webring community quite interesting and, indeed, timely.

One of the problems I can already see though is that consumption based communities have a distinct advantage over, effectively, social networking sites in that in a consumption based community has both a basis and driver. A social network like the one I've just joined for research (hey, I'm an early adopter, that's a first!) lacks both of those elements and that may be something which need to be examined in trying to facilitate "academic communities". What are the drivers? How do you create the consumption element?

I can't fault the originator of that particular research webring for his efforts though, he's obviously made quite a bit of effort to fill the forums with some initial content and create appropriate groups and such forth to interest people. I suppose the conundrum is, beyond your gung-ho early adopters of anything technical, whats the next step?

Well, the logical progression (marketing based) is from early adopters to advocates. Advocates though are placing their "reputation" (if any! :-) ) on the line when recommending, and so that transformation to advocate is generally based on the realisation of perceiveable benefits which they'd like to share (Hmm, I'm overthinking this again probably...).

Thus, I wait in anticipation to see what occurs next in this little nebulus of a research community website.

New Looks

2009-05-02T05:54:00.000-07:00

With so many possible new looks, and after a little play around, I decided on this (I like purple! What more can I say..)

The Gadgets you can add seem rather endless and somewhat, well, useless at times. I'm strongly reminded that the success of Google, by most observers, was it's clear and clean approach (thats not to say I'm not tempted to experiment!)

Also had a play around and and inserted my profile etc after a LOT of consideration on that issue.

On the blogging concept, still going strong, I was 50/50 as to whether blogging would see out the week as an idea when I started this blog, so I'm actually impressed it's made it this far!

Again though, we'll see how it goes.

Strategies to keep me playing WoW

2009-05-02T00:46:00.000-07:00

A recent post by Zarhym on the US forums gives some excellent insight into the strategies that the game designers are now following.

With that said, I think our views on raid content are at odds. If you're having difficulty comparing the raid content of Wrath to the raid content of Burning Crusade, it's because our philosophy changed a little bit. You say Ulduar's difficulty is supposed to be on par with SSC and TK, but that's not really true. The primary goal in this expansion -- and the reason we've implemented 10/25-player, and hard modes -- is to give as many people access to the raid content as possible. Just given the nature of raid dungeons, so many resources need to be poured into making them, from art, design, and story boarding, to programming and testing. It's a very intensive process and we want our players to experience the end result.For this reason we're continuing with the philosophy that pick-up groups should have some level of success when raiding. Coordination and effort will still be necessary, as will the appropriate level of gear; but we don't want capable groups hitting brick walls, at least not within the first few boss encounters of Ulduar.The difference in difficulty between 10-player and 25-player modes should also be fairly minimal. The distinction here is between the guilds that might not have the resources to more-than-double the size of their raid. 25-player content should be more difficult, but only incrementally. You'll find all the brick walls and incredibly challenging encounters in hard modes, and they're worth the effort and status for the experienced raiders.I hope you don't take any of this to mean we expect anyone to waltz through Ulduar. That's not necessarily the case. You still need to know what you're doing and be appropriately geared for the fights. Even so, we want to get players in the door and have them feeling a natural, though slight progression in difficulty with each boss encountered.When it comes to nerfing difficulty, we do intentionally tend to slightly over-tune things at the start. Our goal is to watch players of all levels of skill attempt each encounter, and then adjust the encounters according to the percentage of raids we expect to be killing specific bosses. While some may see this as us giving content to be people who don't deserve it, we feel it's a lot better than taking away content if we were, say, to make encounters too easy from the start and then buff them up after the fact.The days of a marginal amount of players having a go at our raid dungeons are mostly over. We're continuing to brain storm ideas to keep the most-skilled raiders feeling challenged and rewarded, but we're going to continue ensuring that smaller guilds and players who haven't as much time to play each week get a reasonable chance to progress in each Wrath raid dungeon released

I must say, this is the kind of thing I completely expected out of the game years ago, and indeed, commented on many times to my friends etc. Particularly Black Temple (supposedly one of the best instances in the game along with Naxx) and Sunwell, thousands of man hours spent on these creations with about only 5% of the bleeding edge RAIDING players (who only made up 10% of the population) experience.

Now 5% of 10% is still a lot when your customer base is 10m, you've made 50,000 players probably very happy.

The question is, when you haven't made this expensive to produce content available to play for the other 9,950,000 players I think the very obvious move they've made is a long time coming.

As a 10 man player in a 10 man guild, I'm loving the changes they've made to raiding from a personal point of view, I suppose the question is, will these changes go down well with the rest of the player base.

Linden Labs should be afraid; VERY Afraid.

2009-04-30T07:52:00.000-07:00

It's been coming for a while of course, Second Life was a great idea, but in many ways is starting to look and feel very much past it's sell by date (Blizzard take note at the fickle nature of the customer...) Free Realms was more an inevitability rather than anything else and now; it's here.

Yes indeedy, a free game to start, a micro-transactions business model, an establish quality publisher and graphics which blow Second Life out of the water.. oh deary, deary me.... Not a great day to work at Linden Labs

Barca nil - Chelsea nil... My Membership costs; nil

2009-04-29T00:43:00.000-07:00

Community is a odd thing; the concept of membership more so.

I've been a Chelsea follower for many years in a city filled with Newcastle supporters, thus, basically, in a city surrounded by fanatical Geordie's you'd think I would be alone in being an outsider... Not at all my workplace is also filled with "the great enemy" the Red and White Sunderland fans and all sorts of other assorted people.

We're all members of a community? Well this is stretching the concept a bit. I listened to the match last night, am I as equal to the person who watched it, or is he equal to the dedicated fan to went to the Nou Camp? Obviously levels exists here both within the concept of being a fan and fan dedication (as indeed, a number of academics in the area of American Football fan identification writings have already studied with the concept of levels of identification)

What interest me though isn't the community between dedicated fans; it's the meta-community. The male dominated, culturally intrinsic, footballing knowledge which allowed me, for example, to go to the most boring wedding, sit down on a table populated by people I'd never met before, and get into a four hour long interesting and wide ranging debate with two other men about football.

Football; the ultimate in men's smalltalk.

I do wonder if this is the same in America? Is an opening smalltalk gambit in the office "You see the match last night" or "You see that Homerun/touchdown/3 pointer?"

What interests me is the pervasive nature of the community, it's male dominated orientation, the fact that I'm seemingly a member of the community without paying a penny, with the only interest needed seemingly a vague awareness of the basic rules of the game (list to 606 on 5 live sometime and you'll know exactly what I mean here....).

What interests me is it's institutional nature in, at least, the UK, it's broad acceptance. Now, football is our national game, I accept that, but how is it also our national community (male dominated) accepted talking point?

The reason all this interests me is the concepts of habitus and field and their applications to World of Warcraft. As an online game, an Internet connection is a given for a player, and so an assumption that the player has a vague awareness of Internet sites etc, is I think, not a great stretch. A player inhabits an online world as well as the offline world thus, the online world being a world of his choosing usually, an thus he can choose to go to many sites about Warcraft.

How pervasive is then the community information? I'm a member of the World of Warcraft community because of what? My engagement with it? My interest in it? Just my subscription fee alone isn't my "membership", I could cancel next month, leave, go away for a few months, and then maybe return later, and my "community membership" and most of my community knowledge would still be there

Just what constitutes my membership card? The ability to have a conversation about it? When does my membership really expire?

Is the community membership a "public good"; just like my football "community membership"?

Updating my reading list/Blogging

2009-04-28T04:06:00.000-07:00

Decided to update my reading list and indeed, find some decent news, business and research sites which could give me more of that information I so desperately seem to need.

On a blogging note, this blog so far is more than fulfilling it's function as a useful wall and I'm quite happy with the blogging result so far.

Game Design Analysis: Customer Effects

2009-04-27T07:58:00.000-07:00

I must admit fascination with some of the discussions of Richard Bartle in his recent IMGDC 2009 keynote speech. Some interesting analysis of learning curves in there, though I must admit to LOVING this diagram above of the effect of steep learning curves on customer numbers (the falling stick men being rather great metaphors!). I must say though, from a purely personal perspective, I kinda disagree with POTBS being placed in that diagram with a lower entry point than WoW, I found POTBS a huge problem to get to grips with myself

The discussion of a two tier game system (the quest and raiding system of WoW) and the attempt to be all things to all people (and the sheer expense of doing so) rings bells with me though. I must admit however, to being rather doubtful regarding his conclusion that "Wendy" & "Dorothy" can live together and indeed, learn from each other.

In many ways Bartles comments fail to realise that while the roots of MMO's might be in MuDs etc. He is talking about things that only a few thousand, maybe tens of thousands, have really experienced. The real birth of the modern MMO that all gamers lies in more of the Everquest and WoW games. These have a root base, however the sheer customer volume means that far from being a small consequence, WoW in particular is the benchmark.

In other words, what WoW does, how it does it, is your ultimate MMO comparator.

That doesn't mean WoW is the be all and end all, but it does mean, for the majority of players, your product must be, at the very least, fulfilling that WoW fix (i.e. questing and raiding) to get that slice of the pie.

We have though, seen, many living corpses (WAR, Conan etc) have tried that route.

Potent Symbols of Membership: Research Musings

2009-04-22T08:36:00.000-07:00

Been trying to think of some of the most potent symbols of game identification. What stands out as an attribute which says, I not only play the game, I've bought into the entire culture, I'm a WoW gamer.

It was pretty easy to narrow down. It would have to be guying into something which is a cultural artefact, buying into something that says, more than anything, not only do I play WoW, I've really bought into the entire thing.... And the answer...

DKP.

There probably isn't a more single indicator of true buy-in than I can think of, something which truly is a merit badge of "I'm a wow gamer", "I'm a member of a community" than using, having used, or being a part of a DKP system.

DKP is completely a meta-currency, it has no in-game value, you can't complain to a GM about your DKP being docked etc. It is as the word meta implies, completely beyond the game; a cultural artifact.

Of course, not everyone likes DKP, or indeed has used it, and not everyone currently uses it, but a bit like a badge which one put on, is hard to take off, past use or current use of a DKP system is possibly the most power symbol of buy-in I can come to.

Placing value not in the game, but in a artificial construct beyond the game which has a collective meaning to your consumptive community, but nowhere else.

City of Heroes: User Generated Content

2009-04-22T07:46:00.000-07:00

So finally I've tried out the new City of Heroes patch.

Does it make me want to play CoH/V? Not by a long stretch.

Is it interesting, yes. Novel, yes. Would it make me renew my subs? Not in a million years. Indeed, the very fact that the user content creator system works how it does highlighted to me WHY I cancelled almost 2 years ago (that long!) the account in the first place.

The gameplay, frankly, is appallingly bad. The entire instancing part of the game, where it literally is just random encounter after encounter with little rhyme or reason is strongly highlighted by the user content system in which you to can create vacuous content just like the developers.

City of Heroes is one of those games where it has certain parts of it which always stood out as amazing, and the character creation system, to this day, 5 years after release, remains a benchmark in many gamers minds as to how far you can go with character customisation.

The content system is fun, don't get me wrong, and in a superteam situation I can definitely see how you'd have nights when you with your superteam might sit down and play through each others content.... But...... the gameplay itself isn't changed.

I've paid up until the end of the month, so I may visit the Villainous Isles a few more times and play more with the content creation system. It is fun. I played on a few "developers choice" arcs (basically misson arcs singled out as awesome) and they gave me ideas of what I could do. I also like the idea that you can create, publish and then play in your own stories. You can, literally, level up your character in the "VR" user created content zone,, even using your own stories, which makes for an interesting twist.

Given that there is now more user created missions in the game than developer ones, and this is an ever add-ed to number, and that these missions (given what I've so far played on the developers choice etc) are of an at least equal standard to the main games on I can see many people starting level 1 characters, taking them to the VR labs and playing there.

One very interesting feature is the in-game tickets you gain for playing through a mission. These tickets provide an interesting "progression track" if you would for content developers, extra maps, extra costumes for mobs, extra power sets, specific characters etc. It's a very interesting system.

Again though, the systems and bits and pieces of the game seem to work, the game as a whole.... Nope. You start to appreciate the power of a well crafted RP storyline after playing CoH/V, and while static dungeons in WoW may have there issues with repetition, for some reason (I suspect quality) they don't suffer the same lacklusterness of doing meaningless warehouse map 4 over and over again...

I think there's a lot other games (and game designers) can learn from this though.

Returning to a game: Stage 2

2009-04-21T09:52:00.000-07:00

A mixed bag. I still can't log in. WHY?

Because Ncsoft, in their account management "return to the game" link lead you to download the US version of the fecking game client (which, nicely, doesn't work for us EU people).

But, gotta take the rough with the smooth. I filed a ticket and recieved an e-mail reply within 10 minutes detailing the solution to my issue and giving me a link to download the EU client.

So yes, very fecking annoying to say the least as the download is a 5 hour one.

But, I do appreciate good customer care (SEE! I shout to my critics, I CAN!) and 10 minutes turn around time is practically unheard of in MMO's to answering a query.

Weight Watchers: The Unexplored Country

2009-04-21T01:15:00.000-07:00

I'm on a diet. Who would have thought.

I've quit drinking for the last week or so now, and I've been on weight watchers with my wonderful points system (which, admittedly, on Thursday, goes a little out the window....)

I'm on weight watchers, but I'm not a part of weight watchers. Which is an odd one for me thinking about membership and subscriptions, and it makes me wonder, would I be better off joining weight watchers properly and going along to the meetings?

Weight Watchers is an odd type of membership, me and the wife bought the WW books off Ebay and thus have all the documents available to do the diet, all the points calculation stuff etc. Thus the only thing going and paying money to weight watchers would give me is the ability to go to WW meetings.... Which... To be honest (maybe it's the masochistic streak in me) I'm vaguely interested in going along to just to see if they are what I imagine them to be.

The concepts of community, a consumptive dieting community, also intrigue me.

Is it like having a real life raid? Where the small happy of satisfaction is a few pounds lost? Is there a community? Which I would gain access to, if only I paid my monthly membership fee? Do people feel commitment to their WW group, is it a self-reinforcing experience? And so on, and so forth...

(I'm quite obviously going slightly potty doing my research as I'm starting to think of everything in terms of my research and what I can add to it.)

Anyway... I'm very tempted. The lifestyle of an MMO gamer is a rather sedentary one, and I spend far too much time sitting on my own ass to be eating the huge amounts that I do and drinking the amount I normally do.... 17st 10lbs ARG!! I remember when I met my wife I was 13st and going to the gym an hour a day... I had a six pack!

Is that what WW membership gives? WoW raiding feeds to the expectation of satisfaction, does a WW membership feed you something much more devilish in it's power and potentially far more harmful... does it drip feed you the hope that you can return to years gone by, or, some beauty magazine idealised "norm"...?

Thoughts to ponder for me.