Vacations Blog

Forgive me for going off topic. This post is about a panel I attended at the Supernova Conference 2008 called “All the World’s a Game” (workshops list) about how massively multiplayer games bleed over into real life, or at least highlight certain important dynamics that can be seen in Web 2.0 community sites or society in general.

Can any of these insights be applied toward Uptake, search/discovery, and travel planning? Not sure. But thinking about it!

The Panel

The panel was moderated by Susan Wu of Charles River Ventures . Panelists were:

1. Raph Koster, President of Metaplace (bio, blog, essays, presentations, Metaplace )
2. Doug Thomas, Professor of Communications at USC (bio, bio, You Play WoW? You’re Hired in Wired 04/06, WoW Factor at ojr.org, The Play of Imagination Beyond the Literary Mind (doc) with John Seely Brown on HASTAC.org, What kids learn in virtual worlds on CNET, The Gamer Disposition on Conversation Starter blog at HBS Publishing which summarizes his presentation at Supernova)
3. Dave Elfving, Information Architect at Apple (LinkedIn, Twitter, dormant website )

Summary (a few points to encourage you to read the whole write-up!)

1. Raph shared about “emergent” play, like endgame raids in World of Warcraft and Everquest (aka Evercrack) not originally envisioned by the game developers but created by the players.
2. Raph: “Humans enjoy transgressive play” and will always try to break free from the game constraints.
3. Doug’s thesis oversimplified is as follows: Gamers will be more successful in the future workplace than non-gamers, because of five key characteristics of the gamer’s disposition: (1) Gamers have a bottom-line mentality, (2) Gamers understand the value of diversity, (3) Gamers thrive on change, (4) Gamers see learning as fun, (5) Gamers tend to marinate on the edge.
4. Dave said that “it freaks him out” that the Web communities he build have the same, fundamental game mechanics as online games like World of Warcraft. Are we destined to create games that follow that pattern and will we live in a flattened world because of it?
5. Dave invoked the eerie story of Japanese schoolchildren obsessing over “shiny balls of mud” called dorodango and creating an external evaluative process to allocate status and distinction based on expertise gained through repetitive practice creating these balls of mud. Is this simply the human condition? Do game and Web designers accentuate these hard-wired tendencies? Or do we have freedom to choose the future we want?
6. Doug: “what i’m concerned is that kids are being trained to be consumers. In Hello Kitty, Barbie Girls, and Club Penguin, citizenship is being a good consumer.”

Many more points below.

Raph Koster (Metaplace)

‘Fessing up, I missed Raph’s presentation because of traffic. Sorry Raph! Hopefully someone else will post about this and I will aggregate it here. For now, you can nosh on his keynote entitled “The Core of Fun” from ETECH 2007.

Some of the points he made later in the discussion:

1. In response to Dave Elfving’s concerns about designers being trapped into a “gamist” mentality (more on this later), Raph responded that “games are indeed reductionist. All games resolve to mathematic models.” There is the danger that game designers fall into the trap of reinforcing simplistic but effective mechanisms for addictive play. But gamers are capable of transcending simple game mechanisms to create “play” that was not originally envisioned by game designers.
2. For example, World of Warcraft is not about raiding (where a large group of high-level players engage in coordinated action in several separate teams to take down a “boss”). Everquest was not about raiding. Raiding was designed by high level players in Everquest. the actual game is killing mosters. The users created the raid. Raiding is not really part of the game of World of Warcraft. Raiding was “tacked on at the end of the game.”
3. On the difference between playing World of Warcraft and raiding: “We’ve all been asked to go to dances. And forced to learn to dance. Endless succession of middle school dances, proms, etc….and then at the end of the game, you are asked to join a ballet company…synchronized collective action by a number of skilled players.“
4. Flickr was originally a MMO called “game never ending”. You could post photos as part of the game. But then they slimmed back their plan and
5. “Humans enjoy transgressive play with game models.” People try to break out of the channels provided by the game. Raph gave an example of his son. First, “he hacked the game. Then what becomes a hack becomes a cheat code. Then, he look for hacks beyond the cheat code. Then we bought the PC version of the game to hack the data files. Finally, one eventually turns into a game designer.” (Not sure this is normal behavior and there was some comment that his son must be exceptional).
6. There is Player vs. Environment (PvE), and Player vs. Player (PvP). How about “PvD” or Player vs. Developer? Raph suggested that “there is a sense that the developers want me to do this…well screw them…I’ll find a different way to do things”

Doug Thomas (USC)

Network of Imagination

Doug started with a framework called the “Network of Imagination” with three components:

1. Network of Practice
2. Community of Interest
3. Co-presence

I didn’t really get the point of this. Doug? [Placeholder for explanation]

The Five Things That Characterize Gamer Disposition

Doug then went into five things characterizing gamer disposition. This was awesome! It is also summarized on a Harvard Business School Publishing blog called ConversationStarter (which I will quote from liberally here). Doug makes the claim that gamers are better equipped than non-gamers to handle the workplace of the future:

More than attitudes or beliefs, these attributes are character traits that players bring into game worlds and that those worlds reinforce. We believe that gamers who embody this disposition are better able than their nongamer counterparts to thrive in the twenty-first-century workplace. Why?

1. Gamers are bottom-line oriented

From the post:

Today’s online games have embedded systems of measurement or assessment. Gamers like to be evaluated, even compared with one another, through systems of points, rankings, titles, and external measures. Their goal is not to be rewarded but to improve. Game worlds are meritocracies where assessment is symmetrical (leaders are assessed just as players are), and after-action reviews are meaningful only as ways of enhancing individual and group performance.

In the panel, Doug made the following points:

• Gamers are focused on competency. “For example, a Boss fight in WoW can take 45 min. If one person screws up they can take down the entire raid. This is called a wipe.”
• Competence is more important than superstar quality. You’d pick 25 competent people every time vs. 5 superstars + 20 ok people.

I’m not sure I think this is true for gamers who are not raiding or playing instances with large parties. It also seems endgame specific, and not applicable to grinding it out to Level 60.

Doug provided an interesting example with a user created site called WoWWebstats. (image)

These stats provide detailed player stats on a raid. He claimed that they were used to help put together complementary raid groups and not to criticize individual player performance. I find this hard to believe. In any case, this is a “powerful diagnostic tool to engage in joint coordination action together,” according to Doug. He also mentioned “knowledge as a place, not a thing,” and that people would just tell people to get info at Thottbot, a Wikipedia (or maybe Freebase) for World of Warcraft information.

2. Gamers understand the power of diversity

From the post:

Diversity is essential in the world of the online game. One person can’t do it all; each player is by definition incomplete. The key to achievement is teamwork, and the strongest teams are a rich mix of diverse talents and abilities. The criterion for advancement is not “How good am I?”; it’s “How much have I helped the group?” Entire categories of game characters (such as healers) have little or no advantage in individual play, but they are indispensable members of every team.

I like playing healers. But again, this seems reinforced by the specific game design in WoW.

3. Gamers thrive on change

From the post:

Nothing is constant in a game; it changes in myriad ways, mainly through the actions of the participants themselves. As players, groups, and guilds progress through game content, they literally transform the world they inhabit. Part of the gamer disposition is grounded in an expectation of flux. Gamers do not simply manage change; they create it, thrive on it, seek it out.

Gamers have the expectation that things are constantly changing. It is one of the qualities that define the workplace today.

4. Gamers see learning as fun

From the post:

For most players, the fun of the game lies in learning how to overcome obstacles. The game world provides all the tools to do this. For gamers, play amounts to assembling and combining tools and resources that will help them learn. The reward is converting new knowledge into action and recognizing that current successes are resources for solving future problems.

5. They tend to “Marinate on the Edge”

Funny. I understand Edge but not Marinate. From the post:

Finally, gamers often explore radical alternatives and innovative strategies for completing tasks, quests, and challenges. Even when common solutions are known, the gamer disposition demands a better way, a more original response to the problem. Players often reconstruct their characters in outrageous ways simply to try something new. Part of the gamer disposition, then, is a desire to seek and explore the edges in order to discover some new insight or useful information that deepens one’s understanding of the game.

Doug said that there is a lot of social capital created to “be the first to do “x”".

Some of Doug’s final conclusions:

1. Knowledge moves from being a system of static information to a system of “constant knowing”
2. Knowledge becomes a place rather than a thing. Example: Thottbot.
3. Affordances spring up in the world. For example, people can build Add Ons so they can modify their own UI for handling information.
4. Susan asked: “do Gamers have to be “bottom line” oriented? does it have to be that way? Do games have to reduce our identities to numbers?” Doug answered: “Yes and No. The bottom line element is always there. Players want a metric to be evaluated against other players.”
5. Doug: “However, there are slso a set of measures that are more aesthetic. For example, in Star Wars Galaxies, people used in-game elements for interior design, creating bowling alleys, casinos and forums for interior decorating. But then there would be voting and scoring of the creations. There is a constant push into evaluation about myself vs. others.”
6. Doug: “The standard model is money and points, but there may be other ways.”

Dave Elfving (Apple)

Dave Elfving raised some seriously interesting points that I would summarize as follows:

1. Dave is familiar with game dynamics and WoW because he leveled up a character “just” to L65.
2. There is a tremendous amount of repetition, otherwise known as “the grind” to get access to certain boss, certain dungeon, or approval of a certain guild.
3. Quests at level 65 are essentially the same as Level 1. (Elliott: By the way, I hope that’s the case because I personally hate escort quests the most and there aren’t any of those at Level 1).
4. As I collect objects, my character gets more “shiny”…his character gets visibly more attractive.
5. People judge you by your level and your matched armor set. There are visible signs of status and distinction that causes one to aspire to gain the objects that are desirable and signal success.
6. To achieve success, and the acceptance of your peers, you must go through the “grind”

This would be all fine and good, except there seems to be bleed through of these concepts to the real world:

1. In his work as an information architect (previously at Solution Set) chartered with designing social applications, Dave found that his community designs “ape” games dynamics in WoW.
2. This “freaks him out” because it works and “I don’t know if I have a better solution”
3. Dave doesn’t know if we want to build communities that are solely defined by these game mechanics.

More discussion on this topic can be found on the Terranova website/blog.

Shiny Balls of Mud (aka hikaru dorodango)

Dave read an article about schoolchildren in Japan – Durodango is a “shiny ball of mud” – a type of play that Japanese school children have embraced. You get some mud and drying it to make it very shiny. Takes a lot of repetition to make it look good. Then there is an external evaluative process imposed on the community. A child’s sentiment might be: here is my “Level 65″ dorodango . Outward display of reputation. Hikaru dorodango is similar to process of leveling up a WoW character.

Does it have to be this way?

Dave provided online examples of external signals of reputation:

• Metafilter : low user number, and number of times favorited by others
• Flickr : can get feedback ordered by “interestingness” determined by community – viewed, favorited, comments

Dave’s final parting comments: “When I’m tasked to create a community, I’m tasked to create metrics like WoW. The way we evaluate each other is based on increasing metrics, numerical quantification that can be loaded into a database. What I hope to see in the future in games is what gets away from this. But a game that got rid of this…would it still be fun?”

A mind-blowing Supernova discussion.